Unlikely Brothers
by Colubrina
Summary: Harry ends up back in time on the steps of Wool's Orphanage. Raised in institutional squalor with Tom Riddle, he has a very different attitude toward magic, Hogwarts, and friendships. dark!harry, brotp!tomarry. On Hiatus. Thinking of abandoning. Just isn't fun to write.
1. Chapter 1 - Before Hogwarts

When Aurors and inspectors and Order members arrived they found James and Lily Potter horribly dead, Sirius Black laughing with the hysteria of the mad, and no trace of Voldemort.

That's canon. The papers said that. People raised toasts to that, and to _The Boy Who Lived._ The horror was over. The wizarding world could move on.

What everyone in the know decided to cover up was that the baby was missing too.

They questioned Sirius Black. They pulled memories from the very walls of the house. They were talented wizards, these Aurors. No matter what anyone later said about Albus Dumbledore, and Rita Skeeter would publish a biography that said a lot, no one denied he was gifted beyond measure. They used those gifts and those talents to find out what had happened. A bolt of green light had struck the baby and he had cried out with the furious wail of the injured, then disappeared.

No one knew quite what to make of that. Dumbledore decided to quietly inform a handful of people that the boy was being raised by Muggle relatives and, since it was an absolute secret, soon everyone knew and not long after that everyone forgot.

. . . . . . . . . .

"Another one?"

Mrs. Cole looked at the mouse of a girl standing in her office. She tried to keep the irritation off her face but today had already gone badly. Finding money to feed and clothe all the children dumped into Wool's Orphanage was becoming more and more of a challenge and it was hard to see another screaming mouth as a soul to nourish and raise instead of an unwanted expense.

The girl's face contorted into an attempt at a smile. "At least this one dinna come with a dying mum?" she offered. "And he's a pretty little thing. Dark hair. Bright green eyes. Nasty mark on his forehead though. Looks like a burn, poor little mite, and the name _Harry_ is sewn into his nappy."

"Just left on the doorstop," Mrs Cole said. "Not even so much as a note or a blanket." She pointed her gnarled finger at the girl as though she were going to deliver a lecture on what she thought of these mothers but then she lowered her hand and didn't. It wasn't worth the effort. The woman she'd like to upbraid had slipped away, her tot abandoned, and the girl in front of her saw too well the consequences of mistakes. She'd never spread her legs for some smooth-talking boy who'd vanish as soon as she was in a family way. Mrs. Cole moved on to practical considerations the way she always did. "Put him in the same bed at that Riddle boy. We're running out of room."

A nod, a curtsey, and the girl was gone, leaving her to return to balancing books and trying to find a way to wring still more out of the budget.

. . . . . . . . . .

The snake had wrapped itself around Tom Riddle's wrist and was nattering on about sun and mice the way snakes always did. Harry ignored it as he leaned back against the tree, one hand shading his eyes from the sun, and squinted out at the rest of the orphans. Mrs. Cole believed in brisk walks and physical activity and wholesome trips to the shore. Most of her charges didn't object. It was easier not to object. "She's coming this way," Harry said.

"Old bat," Tom said.

"Still."

Tom hissed at the snake and it took off. It didn't do well to be caught being too friendly with the creatures. Mrs. Cole didn't like them, and she'd killed more than one with a rock. She'd tried to make Tom do it once, and, when he'd refused, she'd beaten him. "Creatures of Satan," she'd said as she wielded her belt. They'd been smart enough to hide their affinity since. She didn't seem to be the sort who'd be impressed they could talk to snakes, even if snakes had boring secrets.

"You two need to get up," she said. "Play a little football. Get some fresh air into your lungs."

"My ankle hurts," Harry said. He smiled as ingratiatingly as he could. "Tom's keeping me company."

Mrs. Cole huffed and folded her arms. She wasn't cross at him, though, so he didn't tense up. He and Tom had both become adept at reading the matron and right now she was in a fussing about other people stage. "Amy and Dennis have wandered off, and now this."

"We could go look for them," Tom said. Harry had to keep the incredulous look off his face. Dennis called them the freaks, and was always quick with an outstretched foot to trip or a carefully faked stumble that resulted in one of both of them shoved into walls and corners. He was equally quick with an apology but the smirk never left his face. Amy followed behind him, the acolyte ready to cheer him on. Harry figured she'd be pregnant by fifteen.

Tom's nudge told him to play along and he sighed but did. When Tom had plans, it was easier to go along. "Maybe a walk would fix my ankle up," he said. "Walk it out."

Mrs. Cole nodded, always happy to have a solution. "You two do that," she said.

She was barely out of earshot when Tom stood up, stretched him arms, and said, "They're in a cave down the cliff a bit."

"Snake tell you?" Harry asked.

"Well, someone's climbing around down there," Tom said. "That's why he left his rock."

Snakes lived in fear of getting stepped on. Harry supposed he couldn't blame them. If he were small and on the ground he'd be anti-foot too. He didn't get up right away, though. "Since when do we rescue Dennis and Amy?"

"Since you have a saving person thing?" Tom suggested with a grin. "You're the embodiment of virtue, Harry."

That was such a lie Harry didn't move. He just looked up at the boy standing over him and waited for the truth. They looked like brothers, some days. They had the same dark hair, though Tom's was always tidy and his always a mess. They both had striking eyes. But what made most people see them as a pair was the way they both seemed to shimmer with something extra. Things went wrong around them. Things broke. People who insulted them ended up falling down stairs while both boys were safely under the watchful eye of the matron. Tom could control it. Harry didn't want to be bothered. Working to master what made them different wasn't on his list. As far as he was concerned, they were freaks in an orphanage of the unwanted and all he cared about was that he had the one friend.

Being the only freak would have been hell. People like Dennis went after freaks and oddities and outcasts and when there were two, you were safer.

"Or," Tom said in a voice that was almost wheedling, "since they're alone and we have permission to go get them. Caves are dangerous places, you know."

"You planning on killing them?" Harry asked. He stood up and pretended to stretch out his ankle in case Mrs. Cole was watching them. "Because I'd rather we not."

"Just scaring them a little," Tom said. His pretense at coaxing Harry to join him had disappeared, replaced with smug pleasure as he contemplated Dennis Bishop isolated and vulnerable. "Maybe try the thing I was working on the other night."

"On a person?" Harry eyed Tom. The old board he'd found had splintered into a dozen fragments, its destruction the result of a squinched brow and muttered Latin cribbed from some old Catholic hymnal.

"Maybe," Tom said. "Or maybe just the cave."

"If that thing collapses around us," Harry began, but Tom had already taken off and, with a sigh, he followed.

. . . . . . . . . .

The walls of the cave didn't collapse. They found the pair happily exploring an underground lake, and Tom leaned up against the wall and smiled in a way that shouldn't have frightened everyone who saw it. He looked like a cat with one paw on an injured mouse. He looked the way Harry supposed a rich boy might look on Christmas morning when he got a room filled with presents wrapped in bright paper instead of a grim lecture on frugality and a box with something practical and grey. He looked excited.

"Well," he said. "Look who got lost."

"Shove off, Riddle," Dennis said. "No one invited you."

"Loser," Amy chimed in. "No one ever wants you around. Not either of you."

"Freaks, both of you," Dennis said.

Tom's smile got brighter and toothier and even more pleased. He waved his arm in a wholly unnecessary bit of theatre and Harry sighed even as Dennis clutched at his arm and shut the mouth he'd had open. Tom waved again, and this time Dennis doubled over, his face contorted. "What did you say?" Tom asked.

"Freaks," Dennis managed to gasp out before whatever Tom was doing struck him again and he fell down to his knees and made a horrible keening whimper.

"Stop it," Amy said. Her voice shook with a combination of fear and anger. Had she really thought she'd be able to just pick on them forever with no consequences? Had she missed the way lesser bullies had tripped over nothing or developed boils or just taken ill? Her reaction now suggested she'd never thought this through. The way she picked up a rock and stepped toward Tom suggested she wasn't the brightest star in the sky. Tom pulled another pain filled sound from Dennis and she threw the rock.

It hit Tom.

She wasn't clever, but she'd always been good at games, and her aim was true. Tom grunted with surprise and some pain from the impact, and she broke his concentration enough for Dennis to get up and lunge forward. He had his hands around Tom's neck almost at once and Harry could feel the wild surge within him that always presaged chaos. Amy screamed almost at once and Dennis fell away from Tom. Both began to swipe at their skin with frantic, desperate motions.

Tom straightened his spine and brushed at his clothes as if he were an aristocrat instead of an orphan in hand-me-downs taken from church collections. "What did you do?" he asked.

Harry shrugged. "Don't know," he said. He didn't. He never did. He didn't care either. They'd gone after Tom and as far as he was concerned they deserved whatever they got as a result. He didn't look for trouble but if trouble insisted on coming around so be it.

Tom squinted at the pair. The light in the cave wasn't great and while it was clear they were both scrubbing at their skin, almost hysterical, the reason wasn't apparent. "I guess we bring them back to Mrs. Cole," he said. He squatted down at grabbed Amy's chin and made her look at him. She tried to pull herself away but he just tightened his grip until she was whimpering from that pain as well. "I can make it worse," he said. "And if you tell, I will. I'll figure out what Harry's done and you'll feel it every night until you move out."

"Make it stop," she said. She _begged_. The pleading tone did something cruel to Tom's eyes, but he just tossed her down and kicked her where she lay.

"No," he said.

It had worn off by the time they'd picked their way back out of the cave and up the cliff face. "Ants, I think," Harry said to Mrs. Cole by way of explanation when she frowned at the crying pair. "Or some kind of bug."

"Stinging," Dennis whispered. "Everywhere."

"Serves you right for wandering off," Mrs. Cole said. "You're old enough to know better."

. . . . . . . . . .

Harry didn't trust the man who'd arrived at the orphanage. Most people looking to adopt children didn't bother to hide what they really wanted were unpaid servants. This man seemed different and different, in his experience, was bad. He dressed differently too, in a coat too large that didn't sit right on his shoulders, as though he'd put on a costume he couldn't quite get the feel for, and his beard was too long and too wild to belong to a proper Englishman.

And he wanted to meet with Tom alone.

Harry and Tom didn't _do_ alone. Since they'd been dropped into the same crib they'd stayed by one another's sides, and Tom seemed as wary of being hauled off into a private room with this man as Harry was of having him go.

Some people wanted orphan kids with no friends or family to look out for them as servants.

Some people wanted those kids for something else, and neither Harry nor Tom were naive enough to think the best of strangers.

"He says he's got a scholarship for you for some posh public school up in Scotland," Mrs. Cole said impatiently. "Go on now."

Tom just crossed his arms and glared at this Dumbledore without moving and, with a frustrated noise Mrs. Cole stomped away, leaving Harry in the room. Dumbledore seemed a bit put out by the entire situation, but said, once the matron had left, "The thing is, Tom, you're a wizard."

Tom narrowed his eyes. "I'm a what?" he asked in polite disbelief. "Are you touched?" But Harry could see he was already putting the word wizard together with what they could do and reaching the logical, inevitable conclusion. They weren't alone. There were more people like them, people who _knew_ about them.

People who'd left them to rot here.

Dumbledore launched into an explanation about this school, named Hogwarts, and that there were rules, and funds for him to get supplies, and that no one who wasn't a wizard could be permitted to know. He went on for quite a while until Tom cut him off, not bothering to be polite. "How do I know you aren't lying?"

Dumbledore waved his hand and the wardrobe caught on fire.

Tom looked over at Harry.

"You do understand," Dumbledore said, "I have been tolerant, but your friend cannot come to Hogwarts, and he will have to be made to forget this conversation."

"I'm not going without Harry," Tom said flatly.

Dumbledore's smile grew ever so slightly strained, but it was clear he'd had variations on this discussion many times. Children probably often insisted they wouldn't go without their best friend, their sibling, their cousin. In the end, they surely all went. Who would turn down a magical school? "Muggles cannot even see Hogwarts, Tom," he said. "I am not being unkind. Harry will not even be able to see the building, much less attend the school."

"Muggles?" Harry asked.

"Non-magical people," Dumbledore said.

"Harry's magical," Tom said. "If I am, he is too."

Dumbledore's eyes twinkled. "I'm sure you'd like that to be true," he said, "but it isn't. Whenever a magical baby is born in Britain, his or her name is written on a scroll at Hogwarts. Tom Riddle is right there, on the list, and has been since December 31, 1926. There is no Harry born around that time."

Tom shrugged but his mouth tightened. "Then your list is wrong."

"Tom," Dumbledore began.

"Maybe his real name isn't Harry," Tom said. "We only call him that because of the nappies."

Dumebledore looked over at Harry who shrugged. "They were probably hand-me-downs," he said, "but someone had stitched the name 'Harry' into the nappies I got dumped here in." He didn't think anyone who'd leave a baby on the doorstep in the middle of the night was the sort to care enough to go embroidering her child's name into anything. His mother hadn't cared about him. That was the one thing he knew in life. That and that he could trust Tom. "Harry Doe, at your service," he said with bitter irony. He didn't even have a surname of his own, just a placeholder.

"Harry can talk to snakes too," Tom said. "And when he gets angry - "

"When someone threatens you, you mean."

" - he can hurt them."

The twinkle left Dumbledore's eyes. "Talk to snakes?" he asked. "Too?"

"Is that not normal for people like us?" Tom asked.

"It is… an unusual gift," Dumbledore hedged. "Often misunderstood." He launched into a lecture about hurting people, and how that was not allowed, and how if they were to do it they'd be summarily kicked out of Hogwarts. Tom and Harry flicked glances at one another. The conversation had gone from the idea that only Tom would go to this school to 'they' had to watch themselves. It was good enough. By the time they shook his hand and promised with all the sincerity they could muster to be good little boys and never contravene any rules at all and golly, they were so chuffed to be able to go to this school, Harry's mouth had started to hurt from forcing a smile.

Tom fingered the pouch filled with money they man had left, and the list of things they were to buy. Wands. Books. Cauldrons. Then a magic train to a magic school. If they hadn't spent years making things happen, they'd both think they'd spent an hour with a crazy person. The look of anger that burned low in Tom's eyes would have scared any of the other orphans. Harry just poked at him with one foot. "You mad?" he asked. He knew he was. He was so angry he was surprised the wardrobe hadn't caught fire a second time.

"They left us here," Tom said. "You heard the old man. They've known I was here since I was born and they did nothing. Mrs. Cole. Dennis. Not enough food. Nothing new ever. They can burn for all I care."

"At least you're on their sodding list," Harry said.

"Bugger their list," Tom said. He took Harry's hand in his, a shockingly unusual gesture of solidarity. "Bugger all of them."

. . . . . . . . . .

 **A/N - This grew out of a conversation I had with turbulenthandholding, dulce-de-leche-go, and disillusionist9 at MistiCon. I hope you enjoy the horrible wrongness that is dark!Harry and his one true friend, Tom Riddle.**


	2. Chapter 2 - The Sorting & New 'Friends'

The wand-maker gave them an odd look when they tested out their wands. Tom found his right away and waved the stick of yew wood through the air with a satisfied swish. "You won't be a timid magic user," Garrick Ollivander said as Tom made sparks fly. "People who are drawn to yew never are." He glanced at Harry. "Fierce protectors."

"Harry doesn't need protecting," Tom said with a scornful twist to his mouth. He didn't like this wand maker with his long glances and his attitude that claimed to know dark secrets. The shop smelled of dust settled onto dust, and things long forgotten. Tom wanted to ferret out every hidden thing and learn them. He wanted to fill the very marrow of his bones with the magic that hissed and thrummed from every shadow. He didn't want to listen to mutters about how Harry might be a difficult one. He didn't like suggestions Harry was weak. No friend of his could ever be maligned that way.

Harry might not need protecting, but Olivander was right that he needed far longer to find his own wand. Stick after stick sputtered and died in his hands until all three of them were getting nervous. At last, Ollivander pulled down a box and handed it over with one of his heavy frowns. Tom wanted to wipe that look off his face and leave a trail of blood behind.

That this wand finally worked didn't change that.

Harry smiled, though, and a trail of bright sparks lit the air. "I think this is it," he said. "It feels right."

"Interesting," Ollivander said.

Tom glanced at the label on the box: holly/phoenix. "What's so interesting about phoenix?" he asked. "Mine was phoenix."

"I know every wand in my shop," the man began and Tom narrowed his eyes. He hated it when teacher types began lectures with that stolid air that let everyone know they thought they were so very important. Did this man know everyone bled the same? "The phoenix that gave his feather to that wand gave only one other. The one in your wand."

"We match," Harry said with obvious delight. He waved his wand at Tom and the little sparks appeared again.

"We do," Tom said. He liked that confirmation that they belonged together, and even managed a smile for Ollivander as he pulled coins out of the bag Dumbledore had given him and paid the bill. There weren't many left when he was done, but they'd saved wands for last and already had books and robes shoved down into bags and cauldrons so from here all they had to do was go to the train station and escape London and Wool's and Mrs. Cole.

Harry hefted his pile of supplies and looked out the window of the shop. Other families moved around in the street, robes swinging, children held by the hand. It looked unreal. It was every fairy tale come to life with pointed hats and an actual goblin waddling by and two men arguing loudly about something called Quidditch. A team had cheated, one claimed, using Veela to enchant their opponents.

"It's magical," Harry said. He'd been stuck with awe the moment they'd entered the charmed alley.

"It is," Tom agreed. He didn't want to say where Ollivander could hear him that he'd read plenty of fairy tales and he knew magic wasn't just unicorns and sparkles. In fact, it usually wasn't pretty at all. There was a reason people had invented innumerable charms to keep magic away. There was a reason people feared witches. He settled on saying, "It really is," as he picked his own heavy burden up and nudged the door open with his hip. "Train?"

"Train," Harry agreed.

. . . . . . . .

Tom kept a slightly ingratiating smile in place as they found the platform, boarded the train, travelled to Scotland, rowed across the lake. The castle was huge, the lights flickering, and the very air tasted of everything he wanted. This place had power and prestige. Dumbledore, hands folded in front of him, sat watching as First Year student were ushered in. A witch in a tall hat lectured them on rules and Houses and Tom studied the wart on her chin and the way she thrust her head forward like a pigeon strutting the streets of London. She wasn't even as dangerous as Mrs. Cole, magic or no. More, her explanation of the House system seemed woefully lacking. Maybe the spoiled tots around him, people who'd grown up with parents and enough food, believed this tripe that your House was your family. A boy who'd grown up with shared rooms and the brutal hierarchies of an institution couldn't be quite so naive. In every group there were the bullies and the bullied.

He and Harry stood as students were called up one at a time, alphabetically by last name, to perch on a stool and get the old Sortig Hat at settled on their heads. When 'D' came and went without Harry being summoned to take his turn, Tom frowned.

Malfoy, Abraxas went to Slytherin.

Nott, Thoros went to Slytherin.

When it was his turn, the Hat hadn't touched his head before it called out, "Slytherin" as well and he hopped down off the stool and walked across the Hall, suddenly so much larger than it had seemed when he'd stood in the cluster of First Years waiting their turn by the doorway, and slipped onto the bench at the Slytherin table. Malfoy nodded at him with a sharp gesture trying to be confident and failing, and Tom nodded back before he turned to watch the rest of this Sorting play out.

One by one, students were called, and one by one they were placed, until only Harry was left. "Harry," the professor holding the Hat said. She seemed put out to not have a last name to call, and her eyes pulled even closer together and her head bobbed as she glared at the small boy who clambered up onto the stool.

Tom wondered if the height of the stool was deliberate. Did the school want them to feel small and awkward at this first, very public introduction to the place?

Harry just waited for her to put the hat on his head, and Tom tried not to hold his breath. Surely this was taking longer than it had for other students, but just as he began to be afraid the Hat would announce this one didn't belong anywhere, it called out, "Better be Slytherin," and Harry slid down and made his way to join him.

"Almost a hat-stall," Nott said when Harry sat down across from him. He had a bit of a sneer on a face too thin to be handsome. "Why don't you have a name?"

"He has a name," Tom said in a low voice.

Harry just cocked his head to the side and regarded this Nott with the same cooly blank expression he'd used on Dennis. "I'm an orphan," he said. "I didn't come with papers."

"You really don't have a last name?" Malfoy asked.

Tom thought that would have been obvious to everyone by now, and he could feel his back tensing as he prepared to fight, but Harry just shrugged and helped himself to some of the food set out along the center of the table. "You noticed that, did you?" he asked. "You must be the smart one."

"I'm a Malfoy," he said with smug pride.

Harry turned to Tom. "He came with papers," he said in a loud whisper. Nott sniggered and then, when Malfoy glared at him, covered that with a cough.

Tom felt the smile tug his mouth up. This could be fun. "Is that all you have?" he asked. Malfoy turned a bright red. His skin was so pale, and his hair almost white, and the color stained his skin without mercy. "I mean, that's fine, I guess. If all you have to offer is your last name then you should be proud of it." He picked up the tongs and poked at a platter of rolls. There was a lot of food here.

"It's an ancient family," Malfoy said.

"I'm sure," Tom said. "Must be rough, though."

"Yeah," Harry agreed.

"It isn't _rough_ being a Malfoy," the boy said. His voice had gotten just loud enough for the girls who'd been Sorted into this House to overhear and they looked over curiously. His face got even brighter at their stares and Tom kept his eyes fixed on Abraxas Malfoy's panicked eyes. This was wonderful. This was even better than making Dennis and Amy cry.

"Of course not," Tom said. "It's just… you'll never really know, will you?"

"Know what?" It was Nott who asked, and Tom suspected his last name was just as illustrious. He needed to get a book with all these magical families listed and explained. Mrs. Cole had a copy of _Burke's Peerage_ and she poured over it as if by memorizing the birth dates of the gentry she could turn herself into a lady. He'd bet these snobby wizards had something similar. People loved aspiring to join their upper classes.

"You'll just never know if people like you for you, or because you're a _Malfoy_ ," Harry said. He managed to twist the name into something unfortunate like a squint or a stammer. In his mouth _Malfoy_ became something people wouldn't be so gauche as to mention, but would use as the yardstick by which they measured you and excused you. It became a liability.

"Are you really any good," Tom said, "or do people just tell you that because of your last name." He shrugged. The headmaster began a tedious speech welcoming them all to another term, and he pretended to give the man his attention. He made sure not to look directly at Dumbledore, though he could feel the man watching both him and Harry with that troubled, faux-fatherly concern.

Dinner came and went, and the speeches, and admonitions to be their very best selves this year and apply their minds to the tasks before them. A jolly man with a green waistcoat that bulged out over a lifetime of indulgence joined the Slytherin students as they walked down to their dormitory.

"Malfoy, eh?" he said as he clapped a hand on the boy's shoulder. "I'm Horace Slughorn, your Head of House. Nice to have you here. Your family name precedes you. We'll expect great things from you, m'boy. Great things."

Malfoy cast a furtive look back at Tom and Harry. Tom just smiled at him and he looked away as his shoulders slumped. "Thank you, sir," he said to Slughorn. "I'll try my best."

He didn't sound happy at all.

. . . . . . . . . .

The bedroom was outrageous. Despite the leather seats and the wall of glass looking out into the dark lake in the Slytherin common room, despite the tremendous amounts of food at dinner, despite all the heavy wood on every wall they'd walked past, Tom hadn't quite believed how wealthy this wizarding school was until he saw his room.

Four beds, each with posts reaching up to the ceiling, each with heavy green curtains you could draw around yourself to create a sense of privacy. He ran a hand over one of the carved footboards, careful not to reveal how overawed he was. The orphanage had had three sleeping rooms, one for tots young enough to still be in a crib, one for girls, one for boys. He'd spent every night he could remember in a narrow bed that sat in a row of identical narrow beds. Their thin mattresses huddled under thinner blankets. Metal frames flaked old paint onto the floor. Not here. No one had ever despoiled this wood with paint. You could sink into these. He hoped he'd be able to sleep on something so different.

"Ugh," said Nott as he kicked at the truck sitting at the foot of one of these beds. "I don't know why they don't remodel to make single rooms."

"Sharing's supposed to build character," Malfoy said. He didn't sound like he wanted his character built.

Harry found the bed that he'd been assigned and fingered the heavy blanket. A fireplace sat in one wall, and, though the grate was dark, it promised the room wouldn't ever get cold. In London they'd slept in all their clothes in winter, trying to hold off the chill. He and Harry weren't the only boys who'd climbed into beds together, hoping shared body heat would help them sleep. "It'll be interesting," he said. "Better than primary at least."

"You went to a school?" Nott asked. Tom was about to lay into him that, yes, even orphans were sent to school in modern Britain when he realized the other boy looked more envious than smug. "With other kids?"

"You didn't?" Harry asked.

Malfoy shook his head. "Wizards don't," he said. "It's governesses."

"What about people who can't afford a governess?" Tom asked. It might be possible that all wizards were as wealthy as these two, but that didn't seem likely. Someone had to grow up to be that governess and light these fires and make the food they'd had at dinner.

Nott and Malfoy both looked briefly confused, as if they'd never considered how other people lived. "Their mums, maybe?" Nott finally said. It was half a question. "Does it matter? We're here now."

"Magical classes," Tom said. He'd already checked that the schedule didn't include maths. It didn't include a lot of things. Wizards seemed to be ignorant of history, composition, and rhetoric. It was downright odd. "Though I suppose you both will be ahead of us because of your governesses and stuff."

Malfoy shook his head. "Can't do magic until you come to Hogwarts," he said. "It's against the rules."

"The rules?" Harry asked. "You can do magic and you care about _the rules?"_

"Well," Nott said, "It's not like you can get a wand on your own."

"So do it without a wand," Tom said. He only realized he'd said something odd when both boys stared at him. The looked at one another, then back at him, and their mouths hung open.

"Is that against the rules too?" Harry asked.

"No," Malfoy said, the word drawn out into a long sentence of its own.

"Accidental magic isn't that impressive," Nott said. "Everyone does that as a kid."

Now it was Tom and Harry who exchanged looks. Harry reached down into his truck, rooted around, and found an old Bible Mrs. Cole had insisted they take with them. He tossed it to Tom who caught it with a quick flash of his hand in the air. He held it there, steady, until both Malfoy and Nott were watching, then ripped it to shreds with one whispered phrase and a careful push of his will. The paper tore itself into near dust that burst out, the binding made a loud shriek as it became strips of black cardboard. The boys all turned away reflexively, hands going up to cover their eyes.

"It's not accidental," Tom said softly into their shocked silence.

"Shite," Nott breathed out in awe. "Just… shite."

Tom almost licked his lips in anticipation of how good this was going to be. He was finally home, where he wasn't a freak and where they appreciated how brilliant he was. He could hardly wait for classes.


	3. Chapter 3 - Classes & Quidditch

Harry liked Potions. He didn't expect to, especially when they were told to put their wands away, but the professor flattered Malfoy, which was fun to watch, and told Nott he'd quite liked the book 'Old Cantankerous' had written. Both boys cringed under the praise of their families, and Nott managed a, "I hope to excel on my own merits, sir," which earned him a thumping shoulder clap and the exhortation that he was a good lad.

Tom raised his hand after the explanation of basic ingredient preparation and asked a leading question that allowed Professor Slughorn to expound at almost tedious length on the matter. Harry frowned at his friend. When Tom caught the look he just smiled before returning his whole attention to the lecture. Harry controlled his grin when he realized what was going on. Tom's sycophant act had never quite worked on Mrs. Cole. She'd raised one too many troubled children to not recognize blatant manipulation when she saw it, at least most of the time, but this place seemed filled with easier pickings. He'd bet half their remaining funds Tom would have this old bore eating out of his hand by Christmas.

Transfiguration was less fun. Tom kept his mouth shut, and Harry followed his lead, and it didn't matter. Before the class started the pair of them talked to Nott and Malfoy, sharing stories of transfiguration gone horribly wrong. Both wizards had a slew of stories, likely old wives tales, about people who accidentally drank potions blended with animal hairs and became half-cat or half-rat hybrids or people who stayed in an animagus form so long they forgot they were human. Dumbledore slipped into the room so quietly they didn't hear him and cleared his throat, and all the young students pulled away from one another as though they had been caught doing something naughty.

"I do hope you aren't filling your heads with the kinds of outrageous stories printed in the back pages of _The Daily Prophet,"_ he said with a serious tilt to his head. "That sort of salacious rumor-mongering leads to fear and intolerance."

"Who wants to be tolerant of werewolves?" Malfoy whispered in an undertone to Tom and Harry. "It's like asking us to be tolerant of Muggle-borns."

Dumbledore fixed his steady gaze on them, and they fell silent. The class began with a reasonably cogent explanation of transfiguration and what they could expect to do this term, but throughout the whole thing Harry could feel the professors's eyes on him, worried and watchful in turn. Tom wouldn't be able to charm this one.

"What's a Muggle-born?" he asked later as they loped through the halls on their way back to the dungeons and their room.

"Maybe you," Malfoy said. The words sounded mean, and Harry's fingers itched to curl into a fist. Even without knowing what the term meant, he knew it was insulting.

Nott, however, shook his head. "The way Riddle does magic? Not likely."

"What is it?" Tom asked.

"A wizard with two Muggle parents," Nott said. "Like having a cat give birth to a person. They're unnatural."

"You were probably half-bloods," Malfoy said. Harry couldn't tell if that was a concession or a sneer. He doubted Malfoy was sure himself. "One Muggle parent, one real person as a parent."

"I feel like it would explain why you got left in some orphanage with no name," Nott said. He sounded sure of himself, pleased he'd worked out a problem that had been nagging at him. "You did magic and it scared your Muggle mum or dad. Everyone knows Muggles don't care about their children. My governess told me they used to even eat babies, use their blood in bread and stuff."

Tom's mouth twisted with scorn at that idea, and Harry had to keep from laughing. These two had no idea what went on outside their little world. "Your governess didn't know anything," Tom said. "Muggles don't go around eating babies."

"Abandoning them, though," Malfoy said. "Still pretty bad."

Harry's stomach tightened because he couldn't argue with that.

"Does Dumbledore say you should like Muggles and stuff?" Tom asked. The words were too casual but neither Nott nor Malfoy realized he was probing for answers that really mattered. Harry just kept walking as Malfoy let out a mean laugh.

"Yeah," he said, "Muggles and werewolves and even house elves. He's all 'everyone needs to be nice', but he used to be friends with Grindelwald, that what my dad says, so he's full of it."

"Grindelwald?" Tom asked.

"Nutter on the continent," Nott said. "There's articles sometimes in the _Prophet_."

"Huh," Tom said, and that was the end of that.

. . . . . . . . . .

Better than Potions, though, was flying. They lined up, all the first years at once, on the Quidditch pitch, one student to a broom. Tom eyed the broom with barely concealed disdain but it flew into Harry's hands with the happy enthusiasm of a puppy and once it was there it felt right. He held onto the wooden handle, hardly listening as the grim-faced teacher went through a safety checklist and waited for everyone to be able to command their brooms. Waiting for people bored him, especially when the broom in his hands twitched with an eagerness to be off.

Off wasn't something they were allowed.

Even once the dullards had managed to coax the brooms to fly up into their hands, they weren't allowed to do more than fly at a slow pace, barely off the ground, around and around the Quidditch pitch. It was still good. It was still _great_. He just wanted more. One girl cried when her broom tried to shaker her off, and a boy with a blue tie argued with his broom when it wouldn't listen to him. He could explain all the theory of flying wood and anti-gravity charms in great detail but his broom sank back to the grass every few feet, exhausted by its burden.

"Bit dull," Tom said as they walked away from the lot at the end of the lesson. "And brooms? Can't see why that should be necessary."

Harry shrugged but he was already trying to think how he could get his hands on one of those brooms. A filched copy of _The Daily Prophet,_ found left on a bench in the corridor so surely abandoned and thus fine to take, showed him the prices of new brooms. He remembered how much money they'd had to get supplies, compared it to the listed prices of even the the low-end models, and felt his shoulders sag. Buying one was out. The physical education professor had locked the school brooms away when the class was done, and he'd watched her use a magical lock on the door so he assumed breaking and entering was equally out.

He wadded the newspaper up in frustration as a group of older students jostled by, their brooms in their hands. "Watch it, firstie," one of them said as he passed. "Stay out of the way of the team."

"You aren't the team yet," another said. "Tryouts are over the weekend. Some little maggot might bump you right off, which would serve you right, you wanker. Snogging that Clearwater girl all summer instead of working on your form."

"I wasn't the one wanking," he said with a bit of a crude gesture. "If a girl ever let you near her knickers, you might find out there are things beside Quidditch and your hand."

Another one of them laughed, and they shoved at one another as they disappeared down the hall. "Jocks," Tom said with derision until he noticed the way Harry stood with his fists carefully unclenched and his feet too still. "You want to try out?" he asked.

Harry's eyes were still on the empty corridor where the Quidditch players had been. "Doesn't matter if I do," he said. "No broom. Can't exactly compete against tossers like that who've been flying for years."

It took Tom three minutes to break the lock on the broom shed. "I watched her do it," he said. "Just a matter of doing it again backward."

"You aren't getting one for yourself?" Harry asked.

Tom made a face. "No," he said. "Too much like a crutch."

"Suit yourself."

If flying in a slow circle around the pitch was good, flying as fast as he could at night, low to the ground to avoid being caught, was great. Tom leaned up against a rock wall, textbook in hand as he did something between transfiguration homework and experimentation on an unfortunate frog. Harry ignored the homework, the frog, and the very real possibility of running headlong into a tree in the dark because he was finally free.

Flying, he decided, really flying, was worth anything. He laughed with delight, then again as the air tore the sound from his mouth and threw it behind him, already lost because he was moving so quickly no one could ever catch him. The air stung his eyes, and he was cold, and none of that mattered because he'd finally outpaced Mrs. Cole and his much-hated mother who'd left him at Wool's. Even Dumbledore with that insistence he wasn't on his precious Hogwarts list couldn't stop him.

When he settled at Tom's side again, Tom closed his book and said, "Done?"

Harry grinned. "Never," he said.

. . . . . . . . . .

Never meant he went to Quidditch tryouts. A bored seventh year leaned on his broom and divided the would-be players into groups. Most had their own brooms and several had models Harry immediately recognized as top of the line models, but he wasn't the only person to pull a broom from the pile of school equipment. He hefted the one he had and ran a thumb over the worn place where the label had once been. It had fallen off so long ago the wood was almost universally weathered, but the indent from the metal plaque was still there.

"No one's ever gotten on using a school broom," a boy waiting near him said. Harry shrugged and looked over at the side of the pitch. Tom was leaning up against one of the posts of the stands, book in hand. "Did ya hear me?" the boy demanded. He gave Harry a shove.

"I heard you," Harry said. He turned his back with contempt the boy was probably too sheltered to read, and waited for his turn.

When the captain tossed a practice Snitch into the sky and said, "First one to get it is the backup Seeker," he launched himself into the air.

The wind felt cold, and he could tell at once that the broom under him wasn't as fast or as good at hairpin turns as the fancy models. Money did buy quality. Slim young men darted and wheeled through the air, showing off skills and equipment in equal measure. Harry nodded to himself as he went higher and higher. The gold snitch seemed to be playing with the lot of them. It darted left, then right, then swooped down so it skimmed right along the grass. Three people crashed into the ground as they tried to catch it. Two sullenly walked off the pitch, but one had to be helped back to the castle, limping as he favored an ankle quite obviously sprained.

The Snitch darted up, going almost straight into the air. The gold glittered a little in the dying sun, but the ball was so small as to be almost invisible. Harry drifted downward toward where he'd seen the last glint, then, when another would-be Seeker dashed his way, feinted off to the left with a hard jerk on his broom. The boy followed his lead and went left too, and Harry raced back to the where he'd seen the Snitch. It hovered, almost not moving with wings that were a blur, and he reached out and plucked it from the air. It tried to fly away right as his hand closed around it, but it was too late and he had it.

He dropped back down to the captain, who looked at the worn broom and asked, "Calling it quits?"

Harry opened his hand and displayed the little golden ball. "What do you think?"

The captain looked at him, began to grin, then thrust his hand out. "Baran Flint. Welcome to the team."

"We have to get him a real broom," said one of the other team members. "That thing is shite."

"I just got your Snitch," Harry said. He shoved a lock of hair that had fallen into his face. His hair never quite cooperated but after flying it was even less behaved than usual.

"What happened to your head," Flint asked. He reached out a finger to point at the jagged scar on Harry's forehead.

"Orphans aren't posh," Harry said, though in truth he had no idea how he'd gotten the lightning shaped scar. It had just always been there. He never even thought about it. "Or rolling in blunt. You get me a free broom, I'll fly it. Otherwise…." He trailed off and patted his broom.

The group waved him away with orders to check the board in the common room for practice times, and a brewing argument about how long it had been since a firstie had made a team, even as a backup. Harry walked by the group still waiting to fly for other positions and tossed the school broom at his foe from earlier. The boy fumbled for it and it ended up on the ground. "You can't buy talent," Harry said.

Tom had closed his book and stood when he reached the edge of the stands. "You on?" he asked.

"Seems I'm the youngest in more years than they can remember," Harry said.

Tom kicked at the half-open door and slipped back into the castle. "Malfoy needs help with his Potions homework," he said after they'd reached the entrance to their dorm. "I said I'd look it over."

"He just wants to copy your answers," Harry said.

Tom grinned. "So do you," he said. "Do you think you can get Nott to join the study group?"

"He likes Quidditch," Harry said. "He'll want to hear all about it."

"There we go," Tom said. " _Potentia."_ The wall slid open and they both walked in to the common room, ready to study the way different ingredients could be mixed together to make a new, more powerful compound.


	4. Chapter 4 - Several Years Pass

"You want us to go back?" Tom said. He was looking at Dumbledore with actual incredulity in his eyes. "Back to Wool's"

"It is your home," Dumbledore said gently. Fall had turned to winter, which had in its own time become spring. As the school year drew to its inevitable end, Tom had asked which of his classmates would he spend the summer with. Dumbledore's response had been unexpected.

Harry was equally displeased. "I want to talk to Dippet," he said.

" _Headmaster_ Dippet," Dumbledore corrected him, "and it will simply not do, my dear boy. Hogwarts students cannot stay here over the summer, you cannot simply invite yourself over to the Malfoy's or the Nott's, and you have no place else to go."

"Nevertheless," Harry said. " _Headmaster_ Dippet is, as you pointed out, the headmaster of the school."

"And he leaves these sorts of matters in my hands," Dumbledore said. "As I was the one who found you, you remain my responsibility."

Tom's eyes narrowed as he watched the old man smile at them with sorrow in his eyes, his hands spread as if there were just no other options. "There's a war about to start," he said. "Do you even know what a war is?"

"Of course I do."

"Do you know what a war _does_?" Tom pressed. "What bombs do? They burn things. They burn houses and shops and the people inside them too."

"I am sure you will be fine," Dumbledore said. "Muggle Britain is hardly going to get involved in that German mess. Do you two boys have any other questions for me?"

Harry and Tom exchanged looks and plastered identical, ingratiating smiles on their faces. "No, sir," Tom said.

"Have a good summer," Harry said.

They were out the door and down the corridor before either of them spoke. "It's no different," Tom said.

"You thought it would be?" Harry asked. He pulled a snitch out of his pocket and tossed it casually into the air where it fluttered for a moment as if it might escape before he grabbed it again. He let it go again as Tom watched, then a third time. "The games are better."

"The power is better," Tom said.

"Malfoy and Nott are better than the other orphans."

"Though not by much."

"Wool's," Harry said. "Again."

"Not forever," Tom said.

They didn't say more than that. They finished the year; they packed their trunks; they rode the train back to London with the rest of their classmates and neither of them said a word to anyone about where they were going. Tom shook Abraxas' parents' hands and said how nice it was to meet them while Harry charmed the Notts. Then, when everyone was safely out of sight, they apparated back to their manors in the countryside or whatever lovely houses waited for them with caring parents and warm meals. They began to drag their trunks through the streets on the long, miserable walk to Wool's. They could have asked for help. Any one of their friends' parents would have made the trip easier with a smile, but neither boy needed to consult with the other to know that was right out.

No one wants to really see how bad an orphan's lot is. It's one thing to pat yourself on the back and be pleased that your child has made a friend who isn't quite as well off. You can talk about how Hogwarts opens doors to different experiences and children from different backgrounds. _That Tom Riddle, easily the most gifted boy in their year, or so Abraxas tells me. That Harry. A Quidditch marvel. We'll be winning the cup with him flying for us._ So many warm, wonderful lies they could all tell themselves, but if they saw behind the curtain the story would shift. It would change. It would become uncomfortable.

"It's one summer," Harry said.

"It's all the summers," Tom said. "Until school is out and we can do magic on our own."

Harry looked at him as they trudged through the darkening streets. He had to shift arms so that he could pull his trunk with the other hand. They weren't even half way there and his shoulders ached from the strain and his hand was cramping up. "Bastards," he said.

"Like everyone else," Tom said. _Did you really expect it to be different?_ he might as well have said.

Since neither of them had, however much they might have hoped, they finished the walk in silence. When they reached Wool's the matron was out, but one of her aproned minions opened the door and regarded them with visible displeasure. "That fancy school kick you out?" she asked.

"It's summer holiday," Harry said. "Schools do close."

"Unlucky for us," she said, but she stepped aside and let them enter. Someone had tried to lay claim to Tom's bed, but he dropped the trunk at the foot and just looked at the miscreant until he scrambled off the neatly folded, thin blanket. He'd find a bed in a less well-situated spot in the room. Or he wouldn't. Harry dropped his trunk at the bed next to it and rubbed at his arm. "Don't suppose there's dinner," he said.

"You missed it," one of the other orphans said.

"No one knew you was coming back," said the girl in her apron. She'd followed them up without offering to help drag the trunks and stood in the door of the older boy's dormitory now.

"Don't suppose you can heat something," Harry said.

"Don't suppose I can," she said. "Breakfast's at six."

"Thanks," Tom said. He tipped his head at the door and it swung shut with a long bang that made several of the boys nearer to it flinch. Harry looked at him. They weren't supposed to do magic out of school. The threat had been levied with serious reminders and stern looks.

"It can get worse?" Tom asked.

Harry flung himself down on his bed. Beds at Hogwarts had been soft and deep and warm. The cold familiarity of springs and flat pillows felt like a home he'd never escape. At least it was summer. At least they wouldn't freeze. "I guess it can't," he said.

Tom leaned over and set a hand on his arm. "We take what we want," he said.

Time flows strangely when the country is at war and even more strangely when you are pulled back and forth between two worlds.

One world was filled with bombs, deprivation, and the sneering condescension of a woman who saw them both as destined for the poorhouse. The fancy school magnified the dislike Mrs. Cole had already felt. _Stay in your place_ she might have been saying with every hard word and every unfair punishment she doled out. _Don't you think that school makes you better than the rest of us._

Tom would look at her, jaw set, and count the days until they were done. Harry's arms would cross and as the years went on his green eyes grew harder and harder every time she criticized his hair or his work habits.

If the one world was nothing but grim reality, the other was color and magic, and it was all through a glass window neither of them could quite pass. Orphans were interesting, certainly, and the purebloods had managed to talk themselves into believing anyone quite as good at magic as Tom was had to be a foundling, but he still didn't have a family. He still wasn't important and neither was Harry even though he could fly better than any of them. Harry, who could find a snitch in a rainstorm fit to drown you, was good enough to drink with, but not the sort of boy you took home to mother, not the sort of chap you invited to the club in the summer. I wasn't that teachers didn't adore them both. Tom, especially, had a knack for wrapping even the most reticent of teachers around his thumb. He was so clever, so good looking, so charming and deferential that, one by one, they fell in line. It made them feel good to like him. It made them feel tolerant. They could tell themselves that they recognized talent wherever it lay, even in the Muggle orphan. They could tell themselves they weren't biased towards children from good families.

Tom smiled at their condescension every time.

Harry grabbed the Snitch, won their games, and smiled just as falsely when they marveled at how a boy with no advantages could be so good at flying.

If you let them see your anger, you'd already lost.

Year followed on year, each tiny exclusion a growing slap, until it was the start of September I, 1942 and time to start their fifth year. Harry passed the paper over toward Tom, who'd been folding his school robes with almost maniacal precision. "Churchill survived the censure motion," he said.

"Good on him," Tom said. Wool's had survived the Blitz, but with years of blackout curtains and fires. It was just as they'd predicted when Dumbledore had first sent them back to a Muggle world on the verge of war, which had left Tom even colder than he'd been. "D'ya think that means we'll all be getting beer for Christmas?"

Harry snorted. "You'll get nothing and like it," he said.

"They'll get nothing," Tom said.

"And we'll get everything," Harry replied. It had become a mantra of sorts. "Grab your trunk. Time to get to the station."

"No tests this year," Tom said.

"You sound almost disappointed."

Tom shrugged. "I'll find out who we are," he said. "Extra library time."

Harry didn't think that was possible. He, quite simply, didn't exist. He grabbed his trunk and with tugs and pulls and more than one illegal charm to lighten the load, they made their way to the train, into a compartment, and sagged with relief against the plush red seats. Students went by, most waving to the pair of them, but moving on to see their own friends. Tom had managed to make being invited to sit with him an honor and he could cut pretenders down with a word or two. When a clever, popular boy decided to lacerate you, the seemingly casual words could stick all year. Most people opted to avoid it.

Not Malfoy, of course. Not Nott. When they arrived, they flung their own bags down and stretched out on the seats with their gleaming shoes and pressed trousers, evidence of the wealth they barely understood. "How was your holiday?" Malfoy asked. "Ugh, I envy you. London, and girls and fun. I was practically a prisoner on that estate. My father spent the whole summer lecturing me about responsibility."

"Oh god," Nott said. "The responsibility lecture."

Tom laughed. It was a warm, good-hearted sound that acknowledged their travails while dismissing them. "They needn't worry," he said. "You'll both grow up into neat little copies of your fathers and some day, you'll be telling your own sons the same thing."

"I won't," Nott said. He almost bristled under that too-accurate assessment. He reacted the exact way Tom had intended and it would have been funny if it weren't so bloody predictable. Harry had to keep himself from yawning in Nott's pompous, worried, aristocratic face. "You've got things planned, Tom," Nott went on. "I know you do. And you know we're in."

"What I have planned," Harry said, neatly turning the conversation away from specifics, "is not knocking some girl up. I don't suppose those responsibility talks included how to do contraception charms?"

"Not a thing in Muggle orphanages?"

Harry snorted. "More like masturbation will make you blind."

"Well," Malfoy said, "that explains your eyesight issues."

"Sod off," Harry said, then pried the door to the compartment open again and kept it from shutting with his foot. He grinned at girls as they walked by, one after another. More than half stopped to chat with the charming Quidditch star, forcing other people to wiggle around them with grumbles in the tight train passageway. By the time the Hogwarts Express had lurched to a start, Harry had half-promised three girls he'd catch up with them at school and told one Mavis Hazelton he'd meet her up by the front once they cleared London."

"You sure aren't a lavender boy," Nott said, half admiringly, half begrudgingly, as Harry finally let the door shut. "Did you see the curves on her?"

"You thought I was?" Harry asked. "And, yes, I noticed." It would have been hard to miss.

"All those Quidditch showers," Nott said with a bit of a shrug and a definite leer.

Harry's look of withering contempt made Nott shrink back a little. "You sit here and think about all the arse you want," he said. "I'm off to see if I can get some of the old slithery with the lovely Miss Hazelton. See you three failures when we get to Hogwarts."

. . . . . . . . .

 ** _A/N – I am so sorry for the long delay in updating. The idea of having to slog through all those early years of school made me want to poke my eye out with a fork and I wasn't sure how to manage a graceful time jump. This might not qualify as graceful, but it's a definite jump to the year when the murders began. Thank you all for your patience and your support._**

 ** _Many thanks to_** _ **MaelstromGirls**_ ** _for a very thorough beta job! The issues were myriad and vast._**


	5. Chapter 5 - Evil Things

Harry tossed the snitch up in the air, caught it, and smiled at a passing seventh year. Then he reached a hand up to ruffle his hair. Tom hissed at him, an untranslatable bit of parselmouth that was beyond rude. "Problem?" Harry asked.

"You," Tom said. "Could you stop ogling girls for five minutes and look at this book."

Harry leaned over. The ancient tome had to have been stolen from the Restricted Section of the library, and all the preservation charms in the world hadn't made the handwriting legible. "What is it?" he asked. "Three hundred ways to preserve plums?"

Tom hissed again, but this time there was rueful undercurrent to the obscenity. He'd gone to some trouble to steal a book from the library only to find that, once he'd gotten all the Dark curses off it and translated the execrable Latin, it was nothing but the cookbook of a very paranoid witch.

"Corcruts?" Harry asked. "Is that a pastry?"

Despite the snotty comment, however, he'd leaned over the book, his finger hovering just above the execrable script. "God," he muttered as he tried to make the words out, "could typesetting just be a thing?"

"For people who use quills?"

Harry looked up and the two boys shared a cold grin. The purebloods of their house – of all the Houses - were maniacally fond of their traditional ways even in the face of better alternatives. It was such an obvious weakness they didn't even talk about it anymore. One Muggle-born student in Ravenclaw had made a huge show about bringing a pencil in and the mockery had been immediate and unrelenting. She'd held out for a week before she'd shown up to class with a quill. Telling people their deeply held prejudices were silly never worked. They could have warned her. They hadn't, of course.

"Corcruts allow for eternal life?" Harry had gone back to puzzling out the book and he was sure he'd read it wrong.

"I think it's horcruxes," Tom said.

"Which are?" Harry was used to Tom playing these games. He'd find some text, dangle it in front of him and expect praise for being so clever as to know what it was. He leaned back and tossed the snitch in the air again, caught it, and waited for the explanation. When Tom just tapped his finger against the page, making a loud enough thump the librarian gave them a look, Harry prompted him. "Some vampire thing?"

Tom closed up the book and set it aside far too carefully. He clearly was furious. Harry could tell he wanted to pick that book up and hurl it against the wall and cast a fire charm so it would disappear in a blaze. The look and the exaggerated care said it all. The angrier Tom got, the colder and more careful he got. "No," he said. "It's something I can't find any other reference to."

That was interesting. "Huh," Harry said. He stood up and flicked the snitch towards Tom's face. He caught it and flung it back with all the rage he hadn't used on the book. "Ask Slughorn," Harry suggested. "You've kissed his fat arse so long he'd tell you even if it involved drinking blood or murdering babies."

"Not vampires," Tom said, but he calmed down in the face of that suggestion. "We have him this afternoon."

They did, and after his little club had dissipated Harry and Tom hung around. Slughorn was so visibly uncomfortable at even the word _horcrux_ Harry knew they'd found something big. The way the teachers all understood so much more about magic than they let on irritated him. It wasn't that he expected them to bring out advanced stuff to first years, but they all acted like the Hogwarts curriculum covered everything anyone would ever need to know and the longer they were here the more obvious it became that wasn't true. It wasn't even close to true. Hogwarts dipped its toe into magic, that was all. If you wanted to know how to swim, you'd have to venture out on your own.

Tom managed to tease out the truth out of the doddering, knowledgeable fool with flattery and the wholesome smiles that never let on that he'd kill all of them for one more step up the ladder and then they left, thanking him, praising him again, and making their way to the room of lost things. After that revelation, they needed to meet in private.

The tapestry of ballet dancing trolls twirled around in the forgettable third floor corridor, the place where pictures no one wanted were hung and benches not quite broken enough to throw away were placed, and Harry focused on how much they needed that quiet place to talk.

The door appeared just the way it had the first time they'd been desperate to get away from the eavesdropping eyes of portraits and the politics of the dorm. That happy chance had turned the odd little room into their own hideaway, a place no one else was clever enough to find, the repository for the junk of hundreds of years.

Tom flung himself down into an overstuffed blue chair. The horsehair was coming out in great tufts of brown, and one arm had broken off. He still looked like a lord deigning to acknowledge his subjects in it. Harry rolled his eyes at the deliberate impression Tom had worked on for years and hooked his foot around a less grand but far more comfortable yellow chair and flopped into it. "So," he said.

"Immortality," said Tom.

"At the cost of splitting your soul," Harry said. He _accioed_ a tasteless blue tiara from a shelf where it sat and plopped it onto his head. "Is it me?"

"No," Tom said.

"I think it's a bad idea," Harry said. He picked the tinny crown off and tossed it back aside. "But do what you want."

"He was a little vague on how to do it," Tom said. He groaned and leaned back. "You'd think a school would be a little more interested in student research."

"Into murder?" Harry asked dryly.

Tom grunted at that and idly picked a torn book up off the floor. The design on the cover was the sort of thing that always caught his eye: snakes. This one was an elaborate wheel with several of the creatures reaching out from one point. He opened the cover and began to turn the pages. "I didn't say I would kill someone."

"You didn't say you wouldn't, either," Harry said.

"Well, no one to kill right now," Tom said. He looked up over the top of the book. "Since I've yet to track down my father."

Harry shrugged. Eventually that task would get taken care of. Knowing Tom, he'd get roped into helping. "Anything interesting?" he asked.

"I think I'm going to do a search using my middle name," he said. "Somewhere in the old genealogy tomes there has to be another Marvolo."

"I meant in the book," he said.

"Oh." Tom turned another page. "Maybe?" he said. "It says there's some kind of secret passage in the girls' toilet here on the third floor."

"There's secret passageways everywhere," Harry said dismissively. They'd gone through most of the ones they'd found. The witch statue by the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom led to the basement of Honeydukes. A mirror on the fourth floor hid a wide corridor that led to Hogsmeade. The unpleasant statue of Gregory the Smarmy had a secret passage behind it. They were everywhere and they were all boring.

"Does that mean you won't come look at this one with me?" Tom asked.

Harry sighed because they both knew he would. "Just don't make me late for practice again," he said.

"You and that game," Tom said but getting his way always put him in a good mood. "It's dumb."

"Says the man who wants to go skulking about it the girls' toilet," Harry said. Tom didn't really mind Quidditch. It bored him, true enough, but he could see the way the whole wizarding world loved it, the same way Muggles loved football, and Harry was a star. Oh, a schoolboy star, but parents clapped him on the shoulders at games and made noises about how good it was to see Slytherin winning games and back in their day they'd flown a mean broom themselves and a boy like him must have a string of girls after him, right? Harry found it tiresome and false but he knew Tom catalogued the biggest fans and kept their names tucked away in his mind. If they old folks wanted to relive their glory days through him, they'd both let them with one of Harry' hands pressing the flesh of the power-broker still in love with the idea of himself as a Quidditch star, the other picking his pocket.

The third-floor toilet had a dramatic snake plaque on one wall, the same one that had been on the cover of the book, and Harry sighed as Tom began to press his fingers into it, searching for the lever or pressure point that would make it open. "It could be something else," Harry said.

"Doubt it," Tom said.

Harry crossed his arms and waited as Tom stroked every last snake to no avail. A tempus charm told him if this kept up he would be late and that would mean running laps. He hissed _would you just open up you piece of shit_? at the wall and both he and Tom stepped back when, with a sad screech that let them know just how long it had been, the hatch pried itself open. Paint chips broken loose by the movement dropped to the floor and Tom leaned in. "You game?" he asked.

Harry shoved him aside and vaulted into the dark tunnel. The question was insulting.

The tunnel turned out to be a slide so coated in dust and grime he had to inch his way down it. He'd probably earn a frown from a house elf for what this was doing to his robes but comparted to the cuff on the ear it would have gotten him at the orphanage, a frown was nothing. He pushed his way along, Tom muttering behind him that if nothing else they knew no one had been down here for years. The

The slide ended in a large chamber. A few lighting charms and they could see the room was a dusty as the entrance had been, with a ladder leading back up to a brightly lit circle in the wall far above them and support pillars leading up to a dark, unseen ceiling.

"Hope no one comes in to take a piss," Harry said, looking back up at the toilet entrance. "That could be tricky to explain."

Tom shrugged. "Obliviation," he said. "Obviously."

Harry couldn't argue with that, and they set off. The chamber, like most of the hidden passageways at Hogwarts, was more dull and dusty than secret or magical. Their footprints highlighted just how long it had been since anyone else had been there, though the pretentious sculpture of a giant face along one wall suggested the room had been important at some point. Like everything else in the wizarding world, it seemed a bit in decline. Things had been great once. Now everyone just hid away and turned hedgehogs to pincushions when you could buy a perfectly good pin cushion for next to nothing.

"Wonder what it was for," Harry said idly, as he poked at the wall. "Meetings, maybe?"

Tom had stopped walking, however, and when Harry turned to repeat the question he held a hand up asking for silence. Harry froze and looked around and then he heard it too. A scraping, slithering sound, followed by a restive hissing complaint that no one came, that the speaker wanted food, that Salazar had promised him warm holes and large rats and now there was nothing.

"What the bloody hell?" Harry asked in a shocked whisper, but Tom had already taken a few steps toward the wall, his curiosity caught. He listened intently for more words, more hissing more complaints from that sounded like the largest snake either of them had ever come across. When nothing came he opened his mouth and hissed out a greeting and a question.

 _"Hungry_ ," the snake said, then, " _Lonely."_

Tom and Harry glanced at one another. For a snake that was a remarkably sophisticated emotional comment. Usually it was all about sun, warm rocks, and food. 'Hungry' was typical. 'Lonely' was not.

"Where are you?" Tom hissed into the air, then, "Find a rat or something," to Harry. Harry rolled his eyes that now his job was to find snacks for some giant snake, but _accio rattus_ was an easy enough charm and produced several well fed, angry rats. Harry froze them to avoid rat bites and tried not to think about how disgusting the bowels of this castle had to be for rats to be doing so well.

"We have food," Tom added.

Harry leaned against one of the dirty pillars and waited for the snake to appear. He'd never yet seen one turn down an offer of an easy meal, and this one was no exception. It slithered out of a hole somewhere back in the dark and Harry sucked in his breath when he realized what it was.

"Don't look at its eyes," Tom said. He didn't need the warning. He'd expected something large and old, but this was evil. Who had made a basilisk and who had left it here, locked away in a room under a school.

His opinion of the wizarding world fell another notch.

"You be careful too," he said.

"I will," Tom promised, but he had a hand out to stroke the side of the great beast as it opened swallowed each of the proffered rats and Harry shook his head before looking down to keep his eyes on his shoes. This seemed like the craziest of Tom's many insane ideas but he couldn't deny the creature seemed to almost luxuriate under Tom's hand.

"We should go," Harry said. "Come back and play with your new pet later." He had practice to get to and a forgotten chamber with a monster he couldn't look at for fear of dying wasn't worth running laps for. If he hurried he might not be late.

Tom huffed in annoyance but that didn't stop him from following Harry back up the ladder to the girl's toilet, promising more scratches and more rats when he had time. Everything would have been fine if they hadn't pushed their way back into the girls' toilet to see a Ravenclaw in her blue sniffling by a mirror. Bespectacled, pimply, and wearing her hair in pony tails most girls would have scorned as only fit for a child under nine, she turned when she heard them emerge from the wall.

"You can't be in here," she said. She made a wholly unattractive noise with her nose that left Harry half-gagging. "You're boys."

"They aren't wrong when they call Ravenclaw the clever House," Harry said. He whipped out his wand and tried to cast an _obliviate_ but she already had a _protego_ in place. She might be pathetic in other ways, but she could do magic.

Tom attacked her from the other side, and she blocked him as well. "You dumb bitch," he said. "This doesn't go well for you."

"I'm going to Headmaster Dippet," she said. She shook a finger at them while keeping her wand firmly grasped in the other hand and edging toward the door. "You can't be in here. You can't go around cursing people."

Tom let out a string of obscenities but it was Harry who turned toward the open portal and began to hiss.

. . . . . . . . . .

 **A/N – Thank you for your endless support. Readers make writing fun.**


	6. Chapter 6 - The First Horcrux

The slithering echoed in the toilet, and the Ravenclaw took another step toward the exit, her wand starting to shake in her hand. "What's that?" she asked.

Tom flicked his fingers at the door and it sealed itself into place. He'd mastered that bit of wandless magic long before they even knew what to call it or that there were others like them out there. When the time came in an orphanage to settle scores, you wanted the door locked. 'It's a friend," he said. "I think you'll like him."

His tone warned her in a way that even the attempted curses hadn't and she turned and yanked on the door with sudden frenzy but it was well and truly stuck into place.

Harry tried again to obliviate her but she knew defensive magic too well and, more, in her panic she probably couldn't not cast a _protego_.Some things became habits.

"You should have just let us hex you," Tom said. "What's going to happen now is really your fault."

The basilisk pushed its head through the open portal and Harry looked away. Muggles sometimes shot themselves with their own guns and you could read endless war stories of friendly fire accidents in the papers. He didn't plan to make a mistake that basic.

" _Hello, friend_ ," Tom hissed. " _We found you a larger meal."_

"What are you saying?" the girl demanded. "Why are you making those horrible noises."

" _Heir of my old friend,"_ the snake said. Or rather, _egg-little who took the nest from past friend_. It took a little creativity to understand snakes but Harry thought he probably had the basic gist of it. _"Thank you."_

The girl might have meant to scream but Tom said, "Look at him, isn't he beautiful?" and she made the predictable, fatal mistake of looking. Harry could hear her body hit the floor, dead instantly.

"Help me out," Tom said. Harry realized the snake couldn't fit all the way through the portal, or maybe it just didn't want to come out. It seemed like a good idea to keep the monster confined to its lair so, with a sigh, he helped Tom scoop up the girl's body and push it toward the basilisk. There are easier things to do than feed a dead body to a giant snake while being careful to keep your gaze firmly on your shoes. Harry hoped this was a one-time event, and when the basilisk withdrew, satisfied, he swung the door shut with relief. No death for him today.

Tom was holding onto a sink and shaking and before Harry could ask if he were okay – perhaps inciting murder had left him more emotional than one would have expected – he gasped out, "I know how to do it."

"Do what?" Harry asked.

"Make a horcrux," Tom said. Harry could feel his eyes widen as Tom pulled his black, leather planner out of his robe pockets and clutched at it. He seemed to strain and squint. Dark smoke, more oily than airy, slid out from his skin and collected in what Harry could only think of as a puddle in the air before tucking itself into the book and settling down like a cat happy to have found a comfortable box.

"What was that?" Harry asked but he knew. Murder. He could feel the tearing at the edges of his own soul if he reached down and searched for it. He could have done the same, could have wrenched that shredded bit of his soul free and shoved it into anything. Using a basilisk as a weapon counted, in some cosmic way, as murder. The snake was no more responsible for that girl's death than a knife would have been.

They were the ones who had killed her.

Tom had collapsed down to his knees and was dry-heaving over the floor. Harry didn't think it was from the murder itself. "You okay?" he asked though it was more than obvious he wasn't.

"I'm not going to die," Tom managed to choke out, "So I think I'll be fine."

A laugh barked out of Harry. "You're a shite," he said. He surveyed the floor around Tom. At least body clean up wasn't going to be a problem. One good thing about death by basilisk was you didn't end up with a corpse on your hands. Unfortunately, a wispy white cloud began to form by one of the toilet stalls and, as Harry watched, coalesced into a translucent version of the girl they'd just killed.

She opened her mouth.

"Obliviate," he said in a rush, pointing his wand at her. Then he said it a second time, and then a third.

She blinked behind her thick glasses as the torrent of spells hit her, then said, "Why are you in the girls' toilet?"

"Got turned around," Harry said. "Was looking at a book, took the wrong door."

"I've done that," she said.

That didn't surprise him.

"We have to go," he said, hauling Tom up and keeping him standing with one arm under his. "I'm going to be so late."

They were halfway back to the Slytherin dormitories before Tom spoke. He shook off Harry's arm and said, "I'm fine. You can go to practice."

"Are you sure?" Harry asked. Tom was, or insisted he was in a voice that meant prodding any further wouldn't end well, and so Harry took off to the pitch where he endured being yelled at by the team captain and had to run laps. When someone asked why he'd been late he said he'd had to help Tom back to his room, that he'd taken ill while they'd been studying after Professor Slughorn's class. That had led to good-natured punches, a suggestion from one teammate he and Tom might be screwing, and raucous laughter.

"I'm too busy stealing your girlfriend," Harry said with a grin that turned the tables on the suggestion and led to the whole lot of them shoving at the boy who'd gone down that dangerous road. "I'm surprised you don't have time to be playing the poofter, as busy as I keep her" he added with leer even as he thought that he needed to make sure to tell Tom to claim to have been ill that afternoon. Conflicting stories would be bad.

He flashed a smile at a Hufflepuff waiting by the stands. A gaggle of girls had come out to watch the practice and, of all the group, she was by far the most to his taste. Ginger hair spilled around her shoulders and freckles danced on her cheeks when she grinned back at him. "Nice flying," she said. "Wish you were in my House. We'd win the Cup with you on our team."

One of the other girls let out a giggle that came half way through her nose. Someone should really tell her that honking sound wasn't going to lure any of the Quidditch players to her room but it wasn't going to be Harry, especially after she said, "Any team with Harry on it wins."

"I try," he said. "I don't like to lose."

The ginger girl leaned a little toward him and he licked his lips in anticipation. "Have we met?" he asked her.

He didn't bother remembering her name. He'd learned if you didn't ask, they got offended, so he said it back as if it were the best poetry he'd ever heard, earning him a smile from her that said he'd be inside her robes in an hour, and a honk from her friend that said he would do nothing of the sort with her. If Tom asked him either of their names later, he'd be left blank. "I should shower," he said. "Meet me for a cool-down walk after?"

Tom was tapping his fingers on one of the desks in their room when he got back, showered, walked, and thoroughly sated. Maybe he should try to find that one again. She had a thing for Quidditch players and bad boys and if he had no idea how much of the latter he was, the green tie gave her all the thrill she wanted.

The prejudice against Slytherin baffled him. He chalked it up to resentment of the rich because that was a thing he could understand. He felt it every time he walked through the Slytherin common room and saw Malfoy sprawled out like some kind of would-be king, or Nott writing out his assignments in the neat cursive that spoke of a lifetime of governesses and good quills.

Tom, at least, understood what it was to be poor and in Slytherin.

Tom understood a lot of things.

Girls, however, weren't one of them.

"You done wasting time?" he asked, fingers tap, tap, tapping on the desk. "I said practice, not shagging some bint."

Harry flung himself down on his bed, much too pleased with himself to care about Tom's temper. "Last time I checked, I wasn't one of your lackeys," he said. "And you just need to get laid."

Tom snorted. "You need to keep it in your trousers."

Harry grinned at him. "I'm a Quidditch legend, mate," he said. "Can I help it if girls like me?"

"Not well enough to take home to meet their parents," Tom said and that wiped all of Harry's good humor away because it was true. Neither of them were good enough for any of these little elitists. Tom at least had a name. Not one anyone knew. Not a _wizarding_ name, but a name. He didn't even exist. No parents. No name other than the 'Doe' the school had settled on. No record set down he was to go to Hogwarts.

"Speaking of parents, any leads on yours?" Harry asked because he wanted to lash back. The way Tom's eyes narrowed let him know the hit had struck true.

"I think I can count today a success even without finding out who my pathetic mother was," he said. His mouth stayed in a tight line and Harry sighed and sank back into the soft bed.

"Laid," he said again. "You need it."

"Sex is a distraction," Tom said.

"From what?" Harry asked. "You already said today counts as a success. You aren't doing anything else."

"You're impossible," Tom said but Harry could hear the storm had passed. "I wanted to ask you something."

Harry waited.

"Do you think we should obliviate Slughorn?"

It wasn't the question Harry had expected. _Do you think anyone will be connect us to the missing girl?_ might have come first to his mind, or even, _With no body, how long do you think it will take them to realize she's dead? Will they interrogate her ghost?_ He gave it serious consideration, however. Slughorn knew they'd been interested in horcruxes. The subject was clearly dangerous and forbidden and now Tom had made one. _He_ could have made one. It might be best if no one remembered they'd asked about it at all. That argued for obliviation. On the other hand, for all he was a fool and a sycophant, Slughorn wasn't a half-bad wizard. He was good enough to teach here. It was more than possible an obliviation spell would go awry and they'd end up with a bigger problem than they'd started with. "I think not," he said at last. He wasn't sure, but the risk seemed to outweigh the benefits.

"Maybe I'll ask him a bunch more questions," Tom said. "Things equally obscure but innocuous."

"Flattery," Harry said. "And hiding the real question in a sea of bullshit."

Tom smiled. It was one of the rare ones that made the corners of his mouth tweak up in the slightly uneven way they did when he was genuinely pleased. "And then you can make one," he said.

Harry considered. Immortality didn't seem like the worst thing, and Tom seemed unchanged by shoving a bit of himself into his diary. Death didn't hang over him the way it did Tom, however. Maybe Mrs. Cole's gossipy stories of how his mother had died had scarred him. It was impossible for Harry to picture himself dead or dying. He'd survived life in London during a Muggle war and too many falls off a broomstick to remember and walked away every time. Death was something that happened to other people. Weaker people. People like that girl in the toilet.

On the other hand, better safe than sorry.

"Maybe when I'm older," he said. It was a noncommittal compromise but it would do for now.

Someone hammered at their door and Tom's smile faded into an annoyance Harry shared. You'd think by now people would have learned not to bother them when that door was shut. Whoever it was pounded on the door again and Harry swung his feet back over the edge of his bed with a groan. The good mood brought on by his post-practice bout of shagging was gone now. Tom he was willing to put up with, but some idiot who wanted their attention was asking for trouble.

When he opened the door it was some second year, all tiny and nervous with his face screwed up in fear waiting for the cutting remark he expected to get at the very least. "What is it, ya milky berk?" he asked. The boy's mouth trembled a little but he seemed to know he'd gotten off lightly since it was Harry and since he wasn't fingering a wand.

"There's a meeting," he said. "Whole house. Sluggy called it."

Harry glanced back into the room at Tom, who'd put on his innocent, charming face. "Any reason why?" he asked.

"There's a ghost!" the boy said.

Harry knew at once what he meant but he conjured up the best dismissive contempt he could and said, "The castle is filled with ghosts. What's so special about this one?"

"She's a student," the boy said. He was almost quivering with the thrill of it all now that he knew he wasn't going to get hexed and, probably better than a new ghost, Harry and Tom were talking to him. "She was yesterday, anyway. Some Ravenclaw named Myrtle."

"If Professor Slughorn has called an all-House meeting, we need to go," Tom said. He turned his warmest smile on the messenger boy. "Thank you for coming to get us. It's Rosier, isn't it?"

Harry wondered if the boy died from happiness that _Tom Riddle_ knew his name would Tom expect him to make a horcrux right now in the waste-not-want-not school of thought Mrs. Cole was so fond of? "Let's go," he said. He gave the kid a faux-comradely shove back down the corridor. "Don't want to be late."

. . . . . . . . . .

 **A/N – Thank you to coluber-et-corvus, itisariddle, and broadwayfreak5357 for beta reading.**


	7. Chapter 7 - The Fall Guy

The meeting with Slughorn and the whole of Slytherin was even more tedious than Tom had expected it to be. Once he'd sussed out there was no suspicion that either he or Harry had had anything to do with the matter, it had been almost pleasurable to express shock and dismay and agree that something had to be done. You couldn't just have students disappear – obviously killed since she was a ghost now – and do nothing.

It was Abraxas Malfoy who gave him an excellent opening. "You know who probably did it?" he said. Everyone turned to look at him because he was a _Malfoy_. He preened a bit under the attention until he caught Tom's eye. Then he wilted. It wasn't enough of a change anyone else would have seen it, but Tom did and it was very satisfying.

"Who?" he asked.

"That half-giant in Gryffindor," Malfoy said.

"Hagrid?" a girl asked. When Malfoy nodded she screwed up her mouth in distaste. It made her nose wrinkle and you could see where she'd have lines on her face in old age. "He's a half-giant?"

"What else would explain his size?" Nott asked lazily. "Disgusting, if you ask me, letting filth like that into Hogwarts."

"What makes you think it was him?" Tom asked. Best not to let them get too sidetracked into their prejudices. They'd lose track of their quest for a fall guy in a group wank session on how awful creatures were and while that could be fun he'd quite like them to pick a person to blame.

"You know how he is," Malfoy said, a statement so vague that it could mean anything. It got nods of agreement, though. "Always mucking around with things as nasty as he is. One of them probably got loose, killed her, and ate her."

"It would explain why there was no body," Professor Slughorn said, stroking his chin. He sighed heavily, the weight of the world on his shoulders. "I'll let the Headmaster know. But until the reason for this poor girl's death has been found, you must all be on your guard. Tom?" He looked over at the leader of the group and Tom smiled as warmly as he could.

"You can count on me, sir," he said. "I'll make up schedules so all the younger students are escorted to class by those of us old enough to handle ourselves."

"You watch out for yourself, too, Tom," Slughorn said, a concern that made him want to laugh. What in these walls could hurt him now? He'd outclassed them all even before he'd twisted that pathetic girl's death to his advantage and now he was untouchable.

"I will, sir," he said.

"We can't lose our prodigy," Slughorn said with an attempt at heartiness that fell flat. He stood and the chair groaned under his shifting weight. Tom controlled the curl of his lip. Human weakness was so easy to despise but at least Harry's penchant for getting under the robes of every pretty girl he passed didn't have long-term consequences. Slughorn's habit of stuffing his mouth with expensive sweeties would kill him eventually. Was it so hard for these weaklings to exercise even a little self-restraint?

"You won't," Tom said. "I'll be careful."

"We all will," Malfoy said, desperate to insinuate himself into the conversation as important. Could the flaws of his personality be any more obvious? Tom flicked a glance at Harry who was hiding a smile in his fist. Harry saw them. Why didn't anyone else?

At least he had one person worth knowing in this wretched world.

As Slughorn made his ponderous way to the exit, Tom considered how to make this twist to his advantage. Hagrid had already been named the culprit, and Malfoy would do anything to make his idea seem prescient and clever rather than a cheap flail through his meager brain that had landed on the most obvious target. If he caught Hagrid with one of his monsters, that would indict the creature in the eyes of most of the school, and the Board rarely went against popular opinion. And with Malfoy's father _on_ the board, well, they'd jump through hoops to confirm that the little aristocrat has been right.

He'd have to share billing with Malfoy to make this work properly. That grated a bit. Still, the opportunity to be a hero was too good to let pass. People believed what they were told, and if they were told he was a hero, they'd believe it. That would come in handy some day.

"Abs," he said, and Malfoy smirked a bit at the use of the familiar nickname in front of the whole House. _See_ , he might as well have said. _Tom Riddle and I are the sort of close friends who have names for one another_. He was as pathetic as that girl in the toilet. "Do you really think it was Hagrid?"

"I do," Malfoy said. He was so obviously smug at having his opinion sought out. His eyes sparkled and his mouth twisted the way it did when he was pleased with himself. "He's got that spider now, you know?"

"A spider?" Harry asked with contempt. Wool's had plenty of spiders. They hid in cupboards and closets and under your cot. Without elves to keep things spotless, dozens of children in one building led to crumbs, which led to bugs, which led to spiders. No one who grew up in an old, Muggle building was afraid of spiders. They weren't monsters.

"A _giant_ spider," Malfoy said. "An acromantula."

Tom had to think for a moment to place that. "From the jungle?" he asked. "Where would he get something like that."

"Dunno," Malfoy said. "But I heard him bragging about it in the corridor outside the Dining Hall."

"They eat sentient beings," Harry said mildly from where he sat and Tom felt his pleasure in this whole situation grow. Trust Harry to be on the ball enough to just lob that easy fact into the room. He glanced at Malfoy, whose eyes were gleaming as his half-baked bit of prejudice took logical form before his eyes.

"His bloody spider ate that poor girl," Nott said. He sounded righteous and horrified which amused Tom to no end as, a day earlier, Nott had surely had no idea little Myrtle had even existed and wouldn't have cared if he had. "That just can't be allowed to stand."

"What if he eats all of us?" piped up a small voice. It was the boy who'd fetched them, little Rosier, who looked more excited than scared. "We should kill it."

"It is what you do with spiders," Tom admitted. He let the next words be dragged out of his mouth as if he were reluctant to utter them. "We shouldn't jump to conclusions, though. What if it's not him?"

Malfoy had to rack his brain to find a good answer to that. Before the pause got too long, Harry said, "Well, you could confront him."

"What if he lies?" That was a girl Tom didn't know. Long black hair and grey eyes and a face that fell within the conventional bounds of pretty without crossing far enough into beautiful for him to be sure Harry had shagged her. The whole House turned to look at her and she thrust her lip out into a pout at their attention. "I would," she said. "If you asked me whether my giant monster had killed and eaten someone."

"A fair point," Tom said.

"Don't you think we'll be able to tell if a giant is lying?" Malfoy asked. "I mean, they aren't the smartest, right?"

"Do you think we should confront him?" Tom asked, putting just enough emphasis on the 'you' it sounded like he cared what Malfoy thought.

"You should be sure to catch him with that spider," the girl said. She twirled a lock of her black hair around one finger and smiled. Tom could tell the idea of getting the half-giant expelled delighted her. Under the rich girl graciousness, he could see a thread of cheap malice that glittered like quartz through granite. "Filth that he is."

"Easier said than done, 'Burga," Nott said.

"You're smart," she said, "or so you keep telling me. Surely you can figure it out."

Malfoy gave a crude laugh. "You want to marry into the House of Black, Nott? Now's your chance. She thinks you're smart."

"I didn't exactly say that," she said.

A younger student with the same dark hair and grey eyes stirred uncomfortably and Tom flicked a glance at him. "Orion Black," his brain filled in. Harry wasn't bothering to hide the disgusted twist to his mouth. "I think she might be taken," he said. "You'll have to find a different bride, Nott."

"I'm not in the market," Thoros Nott said. "My apologies to the lady."

Walburga Black's smile pinched at cheeks suddenly burning with bright pink spots. "Who would have you?" she asked.

"Does it matter?" Malfoy asked before the conversation could get more heated. "We aren't trying to marry Nott off. We're trying to solve a crime."

Walburga huffed out a breath and crossed her arms and her eyes glittered. "I'm from an –."

"Ancient and noble house, right," Malfoy said. He glanced discretely at Tom before he added, "Some of us want to bring glory to our names, 'Burga, not just coast on them."

"And some of us need to earn glory for a name no one has but us," Tom said.

Harry coughed and when they looked at him he spread his hands in amused confusion. "What name do I want to burnish?" he asked.

"Doe?" Walburga asked with a sweet, rancid smile. "It's such a pretty name. A little female deer."

Harry's question had been a bit of a joke but Tom could see the subtle flinch at the Black girl's taunt. It wasn't much. Just a flicker of an eyelid and a slight twist to one corner of his mouth. You'd have to have known Harry forever to have recognized it for what it was. Abraxas Malfoy laughed and clapped Harry on the shoulder. Nott edged away from Walburga with disgust. Tom studied her as she sat there, laughing at her own joke. Should he kill her or just drive her mad? A decision for another day but one he planned to enjoy making.

"About Hagrid," Nott said. "If Miss Black is quite done showing off her wit."

"I'll go," Tom said. He glanced at Malfoy. "You coming with me?"

"Wouldn't miss it," Malfoy said.

"I want to go!"

Tom had to smother a laugh. It was the Rosier boy again. He might almost be as big as Hagrid' leg. The boy scowled at him. "I know how to curse," he said.

"Jelly-legs Jinx isn't going to do the job," Walburga Black said.

"I'll show you some things," Harry said. "Let them deal with the spider-lover."

And with that it was settled. The rest of the House wandered back off to their rooms. Orion and Walburga Black managed to turn Tom's stomach by lingering to put their heads together. Orion was a child, and her cousin. Was she incestuous and vile as well as stupid? Harry loped off toward one of the endless empty classrooms to 'study' with Rosier. Any teacher who found them would be charmed the Quidditch star was taking time to help a younger Housemate out with his spell work. Only Dumbledore would be canny enough to catch the scent of darkness the kind of magic Harry would be teaching left on the air and Harry would be smart enough to stay out of the transfiguration professor's way.

Tom held the door for Abraxas Malfoy. "After you, Abs," he said. "Let's go see what dear old Hagrid is up to."

They found him in one of the basement rooms. Abraxas hadn't asked about the location spell Tom used, which was good since he was fairly sure the Ministry frowned on magic you made up yourself from a few ideas and a few dark books. It led them right to Hagrid, however, and he was feeding hunks of meat to his spider.

"I knew giants were stupid," Malfoy said. "Fee, fi, fo fum and all that, but, really, a spider for a pet? Just not done, old chap."

Hagrid put himself between the two boys and their outstretched wands and his pet. Tom had to control a snort at that. The idea this half-breed Gryffindor was more dangerous than his man-eating spider was ludicrous. "He's jus' a wee baby," Hagrid said. "He won't harm you none."

"Some baby," Malfoy said. It was already the size of a small dog and tearing into the raw flesh Hagrid was feeding it with salivating glee. It wasn't hard to imagine it devouring a body. Tom could tell Malfoy had already made that leap in his mind. By the time he was retelling this story the spider would probably have one of the girl's hands dangling from its mouth. "Does Dippet know you've got that thing?"

"Aragog isn't a thing," Hagrid said. His voice was going up and up already and Tom could feel his mouth twitch. No Slytherin would be so emotional so quickly. Get emotional and you lost your mental advantage. Time to goad the giant.

"Oh?" he asked. "Looks like a spider to me. A monster. Monsters are _things_ , Hagrid."

"And students are allowed a toad, a cat, or an owl," Malfoy said. "Even if your nasty spider didn't kill that girl, you're breaking Hogwart's rules."

"Lotsa people have other pets," Hagrid said. He'd backed up until he was brushing against the long hairs of the spider and Tom felt his stomach gurgle. He wasn't afraid of arachnids, but who cuddled one?

"Toads," Malfoy said. "Harmless toads."

"Or ferrets," Tom said. "Can't go wrong with a little, white ferret."

"Not dangerous beasts," Malfoy said. "Not that."

"He's harmless," Hagrid insisted but Tom shook his head in faux sorrow.

"You might think so," he said, pretending to concede the point, "but a girl died, Hagrid, and her body is missing, and there's only one creature in this castle that would do that and you're standing between us and it." He hardened his voice. "Step aside."

Hagrid leaned down to whisper to his beast, then straightened. "You don' have to do this," he said.

"I'm afraid we do."

Hagrid took a step toward them and then, before Tom could react, lowered his head and charged both boys. He pulled his wand out as he moved and cast spell after spell. Tom countered all but one – he had to leave at least one for Malfoy so he'd feel heroic – but by the time they had Hagrid subdued, panting and struggling under a full body bind, the spider had scuttled away, out some hole in the wall.

Malfoy looked almost relieved they weren't going to have to capture the thing when he said, "You're going to have to come with us to see Headmaster Dippet, Hagrid. This looks bad. This looks very bad."

Tom nodded as seriously as he could. "Monsters don't make good pets, Hagrid," he said.

. . . . . . . . . .

 **A/N – thank you to** **Slytherinxbadxgirl for beta reading. She has approved this chapter.**


	8. Chapter 8 - The Gaunt House

Harry passed the marmalade down the table. The girl who took it from him brushed her fingers over his and he winked at her. She turned bright red and busied herself scooping out enough of the orange spread for three people and spreading it on her toast. At the Head Table Dippet cleared his throat and clinked his fork against his glass to get the room's attention.

Harry glanced over at Tom. He had his cat-whose-been-in-the-cream smile on. So did Abraxas, though he probably genuinely thought he'd done something good in turning poor Rubeus Hagrid in, the fool. Well, better that than the truth.

"Boys and girls," Dippet said. "In every tragedy, there can be a hero, and we here at Hogwarts have been lucky enough to have not one but two heroes."

"Is this about that Ravenclaw who died?" a girl down the table hissed to the person next to her.

"Shh," was the response. "I want to hear this."

"First, I'd like to remind you that Miss Warren's funeral will be a Muggle event. We are giving passes to students who would like to pay their respects but you must know how to dress and act appropriately for the Muggle world."

"Well, I'm out," Walburga Black said loudly. Headmaster Dippet looked over at the Slytherin table and she smiled at him the way powerful girls did when they thought they were untouchable. Dippet frowned but went on.

"Second, students are permitted a limited range of familiars for a reason and anyone found with an inappropriate pet will be asked to send it home."

That seemed like an awfully graceful way of dancing around Hagrid's expulsion. The Board had descended upon the school in a rage. How had this been permitted to happen? Why was there a giant at Hogwarts, and one who kept monsters as pets? His wand had been broken and he'd been expelled, though Dumbledore had stepped in to find him a hut on the edge of campus. _He has nowhere to go_ , he'd reportedly said. Harry had considered suggesting Wool's. A Muggle orphanage was good enough for him and Tom. What made this Hagrid so special Albus Dumbledore had stepped in? Why had no hut been found to keep him and Tom from having to go back to war-torn London over the summers.

He poured himself another glass of juice as Dippet reached his third point.

"Finally, would Abraxas Malfoy and Tom Riddle please stand."

Abraxas looked arrogantly pleased with himself. He tossed his head back and looked around the room with pleasure. Tom played it better. He pulled himself to his feet with reluctance that you had to know him well to see was feigned. His face had a look of sad duty. He wasn't pleased to have found the murderer. He was a boy sorry it had come to this at all.

It was all Harry could do to keep from rolling his eyes as Dippet held up an award for special services to the school. It would live in the Hogwarts trophy case so all future generations of students would know that bravery came from within, that anyone could be of service, that nobility belonged to all of us.

Tom couldn't quite stop his lip from curling at the speech which dwelled a little too long on how anyone could be heroic. Even people like Tom, Dippet seemed to mean. Even Muggle orphans.

The wizarding world cared too much about family. About history. About connections. Harry caught Tom's eye as he lowered himself back to the ancient wooden bench, surely warmed by the backsides of generations of precious little magical scions from good families. He lifted his juice goblet toward Tom. "To the future of the wizarding world," he said.

They'd make it theirs.

"Well," Nott asked once Dippet had sat down again. "What do our heroes have planned for the summer holiday?"

Malfoy made a theatrical groan. "My father is making me spend time with him at the Ministry," he said. "Says this whole thing needs to be capitalized on."

"Wants to introduce you round?" asked tiny Evan Rosier. He'd taken to following the older students around and because Tom seemed to like him the rest of them had taken to treating him a bit like a pet. If they knew how quickly he learned Dark curses, they'd have enough care to treat him like one that could bite but, as it was, Abraxas just ruffled his hair then punched him lightly in the side of the arm.

"Nah," he said. "They all know me. It's just… parents."

The groan was met with knowing laughs from the table. Parents were universally understood to be endlessly tiring. They wanted you to stand up straight, to come say hullo to this nice witch from France, to greet their chums at the Ministry. Parents had your whole life mapped out.

Harry flicked a glance at Tom. He didn't have to do more than that. The cruel smile surfaced for an instant and then sank back into the cold depths. Tom patted Malfoy on the shoulder. "He'll have you dining out on poor Hagrid forever," he said. "Good to get one real thing in, isn't it?"

"What do you mean?" Malfoy asked.

Tom shrugged. "Before you put on the dress robes and go to work every day."

Malfoy's smile became instantly more strained.

"And what will you be doing?" Walburga Black apparently had no sense of self-preservation. "It's not like you have a home to go to."

Tom nodded his head ever so slightly. "I have a lead on my mother's family," he said. "I'll be touring some little village, looking at headstones."

"Sounds delightful," Walburga said. "Orion and I are going to Bulgaria."

"On your honeymoon?" Harry asked. "Or are his parents taking you along as a babysitter?"

The look she threw him tried to commit murder. It failed and Harry took another bite of his breakfast. Tom sniggered.

"Maybe you could come by the Manor." Abraxas Malfoy was trying to act nonchalant but the casual wipe of his palms across his trousers gave him away. Poor bastard was nervous and sweating. "Meet my parents."

Tom's smile looked absolutely relaxed and as Harry chewed he considered the way no one could possibly know that that invitation was the culmination of years of work. He'd courted Abraxas as carefully as if it had been a romantic conquest. Tom didn't care about a roll in the sheets, though, much less a relationship. He wanted Abraxas' connections and money.

"If you wouldn't be embarrassed by me," Tom said casually. Never let them forget what you were. Never let that orphanage become something you hid. Poverty made you better. Struggle made you stronger. None of these pampered little aristocrats had any idea how much stronger.

"The prodigy?" Abraxas hurried to reassure. "Who helped me catch Rubeus Hagrid? They'll be thrilled to meet you."

One of Tom's eyes twitched at the idea he'd helped Abraxas but other than that slight tell his easy demeanor didn't change. "Then yes," he said.

"What about you, Harry?" one of the girls asked him. "You live in that same awful place as Tom does, right?" He'd exploited that doe-eyed eagerness to play poverty tourist before but he wasn't in the mood right now. Her question was nothing but a reminder he'd spend the summer placating an old Muggle who liked to remind her charges they were nothing and would be lucky to get a job in a factory. She was a big fan of people knowing their place in the world. If he'd been a little older and a little wiser he might have seen that came from a lifetime of disappointment but because he was young and sure every slight was personal it made him hate her.

"I do," he said. "Last summer, though."

"Don't be ridiculous," Tom said. "Harry'll come grave hunting with me."

"Not the holiday I would have picked," someone said.

"How will you afford it?" someone else asked. That question had a sly hint of malice. _You're poor_ , it said. _How can the likes of you go on holiday, even to look at graves in some old village?_

Tom shrugged. It was his genial-I'll-kill-you-later shrug. "As long as you don't demand a five-star hotel, travel's cheap," he said. Harry knew he wanted that five-star hotel, but enough money for cheap lodgings and fish and chips wasn't difficult for anyone who knew how to do a confunding charm without a wand. The trace set to keep underage wizards from terrorizing the world around them before they had the maturity to know better relied on wands. People gave Tom the change from their pockets, or forgot to ask him to pay, or were sure he already had.

You got tired of cheap food, though, and people could only be confunded into handing over little things. By the time they reached Little Hangleton, Harry was more than tired of it. They'd charmed their way out of Wool's Orphanage claiming they had research to do for a school project but they'd spent enough time with Mrs. Cole to miss the richer food of Hogwarts. Harry took a mealy apple from a shop in the village and let Tom confund the shop-owner.

In the sun of the village he sank his teeth into the fruit. It didn't satisfy.

"Tom." He nudged him and jerked his head toward two girls who'd been staring at them – at Tom, to be precise – since they'd arrived. "You have admirers." Only they weren't admirers. Not exactly. Harry had been the recipient of more than one lust filled glance at Hogwarts and these didn't have the same feel. It wasn't just that the girls were focused on Tom. Plenty of girls at Hogwarts made the mistake of ogling Tom before they figured out he barely noticed they were alive and had no intention of returning their interest. It was that they looked unhappy to see him.

Tom flicked a glance at the girls and promptly dismissed them. Too ordinary to take notice of. Too Muggle. "Let's go find this Gaunt house," he said.

"Gaunt," Harry said doubtfully. The very name seemed ominous.

" _Marvolo_ Gaunt," Tom said, emphasizing the first name. Harry sighed. It was hard to believe that this Marvolo could really be the one and only other wizard of that name in all of Britain but if Tom wanted to come and track the bugger down, that's what they would do.

A few quick questions and Harry had the starting girls laughing at his charm and whispering behind their hands. One of them playfully batted him on the arm and he smirked at her with a promise he never intended to fill. Once he got Tom out to the Gaunt house – which the girls had been happy to provide directions to – he hoped to never come back to this little town again. It made him uneasy.

That sense of the creeps magnified when they found the Gaunt house right where the girls had said it would be. He couldn't fault them for their directions, or their descriptive powers. They'd said it was a hovel and it was. Harry had grown up in poverty. He and Tom had spent more time winding in and out of bad neighborhoods than Mrs. Cole had ever guessed. He'd seen the results of not enough money often enough he didn't think he could be shocked.

He'd been wrong.

Urban poverty and rural poverty were just different.

The way the Gaunt's lived horrified him. "The dirt is dirty," he said after they stepped inside and shut the door behind them. He didn't want to touch anything. He didn't want to talk to the wizard brandishing a wand at them and cackling with what he thought was superiority.

"Tis dirty 'cause that slattern run off," he said. "Fell in love with that Muggle Riddle and drugged him until he dinna love her no more." He laughed and spittle sprayed and Harry's stomach twisted. This was Tom's family? The orphanage was starting to look decent.

"What slattern was that?" Tom asked. He twisted his hand through the air and the filthy man's wand came obediently to him. He didn't seem to want to touch it. By the way his face screwed up and his jaw tightened, Harry suspected the wand was as grimy as the rest of the squalid shack. That seemed unthinkable. Your wand was _you._ He'd never met a wizard who didn't keep his polished but here they were and the wizard with so little respect for his own tool was Tom's…father? Uncle? Cousin?

He cackled then hissed at them in Parseltongue. "Egg sister idiot," was probably the best translation. Uncle, then.

"Who is Riddle?" Tom asked.

The hissing sounded amused and Harry realized with some amusement that this fool had no idea they understood every word of what he probably thought was his precious, private language. "Too much sun and too nice rock, pretty scales, hate, hate, hate," said the man. Then he squinted at them both. "Looks like you. You one of them Riddle brats? This is my house." He waved his hand at them as though he still had his wand in it. "Get out."

Harry's eyes caught on the gold ring that sparkled even in this cottage. There was one thing this man cared about then. The gold bad twisted around a dark stone engraved with a symbol Harry didn't recognize. A triange held a circle with a line through it. "What's that?" he asked.

"Centuries we've had this," he said. He coughed and something ugly rattled in his lungs. Harry'd heart that sound before. It was damp and not enough food and no medicine and it sat down in your chest and slowly killed you. He couldn't bring himself to be sorry. "Purebloods all the way back, we are, all the way to Salazar Slytherin himself. Not that that means anything to filth like yous."

Tom reached forward and grabbed the man's hand. A quick bend of the wrist and he had the old fool on his knees. By the sound of the cracking, he broke the bone in the old man's finger as he yanked off the ring. He rubbed it on his trousers and looked at it. "Family heirloom, you say."

"You taking it?"

Tom didn't bother to answer.

"We killing him?"

Tom looked at the man, the last of the pureblood House of Gaunt, and smiled. He tossed the dirty wand back at him. "I think I want to go visit my father first," he said. "But we'll be back."

. . . . . . . . .

 **A/N – Please accept my apologies for the ongoing slow updates of this story. I find it tricky to write.**


	9. Chapter 9 - The Riddle House

Finding where Tom's father lived wasn't difficult. The manor house stood atop a hill and looked down over the village like a lord surveying all that belonged to it. "Nice place," Harry said as he cast a quick charm to unlock the door and they let themselves in. Tom looked around and could feel his stomach do something dark and ugly. If he'd been at Wool's he would have assumed the meat had gone off. Here he couldn't blame the churning on anything as mortal and ordinary as spoilage. Here he could name it for the hate that it was. He took a few steps into the cool, dark foyer. After the heat of the sun it was pleasant. Welcoming. Perhaps he'd have been less angry if the wealth had seemed ostentatious. He could have hated his father for having bad taste and it would have felt better than this pleasant, welcoming house. There was a bench where visitors could pry off boots made muddy by tromping along the English country side. There was a table with a tray where mail could be left.

Harry let out a low whistle. "Well," he said. "Guess we know why those girls were staring." He pointed up at an oil painting.

"The technique is bad," Tom said with a sneer he'd copied from the Blacks and the Malfoys of the world. He wasn't wrong. The painter had been mediocre and the work was clunky and stolid. You still couldn't mistake the likeness, or misread the small gold label reading _Thomas Riddle_. He was his father's duplicate, from the hair to the eyes to the skin tone.

"Snob," Harry said. The tone was fond but they eyes regarding him were worried. For the first time, Tom envied Harry his utter lack of a family. He'd clung to the idea of the mother who'd died to give him life. It had made him a little better than the rest of the orphans. A little more loved. If he had a rich father who'd never sought him out, what did that make him? Less loved? Less worthy?

Perhaps the man hadn't realized Merope was pregnant.

"Let's go see if they're home," he said.

They were. An elderly couple sat in a solarium, basking in the sun like a pair of cats. The brick floor had buckled in a few places but the room still spoke of comfort and wealth. "Who is it?" said a querulous voice when Tom and Harry pushed the door open. "Marie, we said no visitors."

"It's Marie's day off." This voice was just as dissatisfied but higher.

"Damn that girl. Lazy thing."

"I'm afraid we missed Marie," Tom said. He licked his lips. These were his grandparents, then. These frail, displeased people, who didn't want to have visitors and who seemed unhappy their servant had a day off.

"Good luck for her," Harry said. He pulled out a wicker chair and sat down. He already knew where this was going but he'd known Tom for a while. Their whole lives. Brothers in all by parentage. If anyone understood him, it was Harry. "Don't you think?"

"Everyone has days where death just passes them by," Tom said. "You almost fall down the stairs but don't. The bomb hits the building next door. You take the day off."

They squinted at him. It made their ugly faces creep up around their eyes, and he felt the loathing of the young and beautiful for the old. "Tom?" one of them asked.

"I'm over here, Mother." The voice was modulated and pleasant and reeked of money. Tom knew the voices of the rich. He'd lived with them, at least at Hogwarts, since he'd been eleven. He'd taught himself their vowels and their cadence and their slang as if he'd been teaching himself French or German or Italian. It was the language of power and he would speak it. It had never filled him with a sense of murderous rage before. So, this was his father. This _rich man_ was his father.

He could feel the thin blankets of Wool's. He could feel the way shivering, and even the heat of another body huddled against yours, never quite erased the damp chill of a January night.

It was warm in this solarium. Hot, even.

"Looks like you," the old woman said. She was confused. Her son stood behind her, a grown man. His double stood in front of her, young again, death in his eyes if only she had the wit to see it.

"That Gaunt girl's brat," his father said. He ran his eyes up and down Tom's slender frame with a curled lip. "Come to try to blackmail me? For money, you'll keep your silence?"

"She's dead," Tom said. It came out even more baldly than he had intended. This wasn't the way he had expected this to go. Funny how fantasy could grip even the strongest mind, warp even the most sensibly pragmatic person. He hated that bit of himself that had hoped to be welcomed home, that had hoped this father hadn't known he'd been born, hadn't known he existed. To be embraced as the long-lost son, even by a Muggle, would have been gratifying.

Well, he supposed it wasn't his day to be gratified. It was a day to learn again that one needed to be hard. One needed to be unfeeling. Or, rather, if one was going to feel anything it should be the glee of a cat letting a mouse go just far enough to make the chase fun again.

His father didn't seem particularly bothered Merope Gaunt had died. He curled his lip again and narrowed his eyes. "I hope you don't expect me to offer condolences," he said. "She deceived me."

"Ensorcelled," Harry said.

"It was certainly what it seemed like," the older Tom Riddle said. He glanced at Harry. "Who are you?"

"Witness for the prosecution, I think," Harry said. He met Tom's eyes. "You plan to drag this out?"

"No," Tom said, though he rather liked the idea of making this man grovel. He was better than that, though. He ran a thumb over the Gaunt ring. His heritage was there, not here. He was from the darkness. He didn't belong in this pretty room with its overheated air and its sunshine. He pulled out his wand and leveled it at them. "It wasn't _like_ being enchanted. This is exactly what it was."

He killed the old people first. He made it fast. Whatever their sins were, what he really wanted was to make this father of his see them die. Let that go on to long and he might muster the strength of will to try to defend them. That would be unfortunate. A quick _Avada Kedavra_ and they slumped, one after the other. "Magic can make you love," he said as the other Tom Riddle sucked in his breath in horror and crouched down, his middle-aged hands reaching to feel for a pulse. People got so ugly as they aged. Old people were disgusting to look at. He needed to make sure that didn't happen. Not to him. He watched his father feel for the breath that wasn't there and added with real pleasure, "Magic can also make you suffer."

"Or die," Harry said.

"Or die," Tom agreed.

His father straightened up. "What did you do?" he asked. He probably thought his voice sounded menacing. He would fight off this murderer who'd come into his home and slaughtered his parents. He would be brave. Wasn't that adorable? Muggles were so pathetic. So weak. What could he do in the face of his own son's magic. Nothing, that's what. He could abandon his wife. He could let his son grow up in poverty. He could be a monster, a selfish, horrid monster, but he would never be magical. He would never be better.

"I killed them," Tom said. The words tasted good in his mouth so he said them again, just to savor the sweetness. "I killed them."

"That's not -."

He was probably going to go on about how that wasn't possible and that would be so boring. He was here for reasons of his own. He'd wanted to find his father. Now he wanted him to hurt. He didn't need to go on some long explanation of how magic was real. It wasn't like he cared what any Muggle thought anyway. None of them mattered, not even this one. Especially not this one. He sliced his wand through the air and a cut appeared on his father's face. The man let out a gasp and pressed his hand to the wound, then pulled it away and looked at the blood. He seemed shocked even though he'd just seen a wand wield death. Idiot. He must have gotten his wits from his mother because they clearly hadn't come from this cretin.

"Magic is very real," Tom said. "My mother wanted you badly enough to waste some of it on you, Muggle filth that you are. You should have been more grateful."

Another swipe of the wand and this time Tom Riddle Sr. doubled over as his lungs screamed in pain. Lungs wanted a lot of things to work properly. It wasn't hard to take one of them away. "You should have kissed her feet for being willing to sully herself with you." Another swipe, and this time Tom went after the heart. His father hadn't been willing to give it to his mother, after all. Had let the woman die at Wool's. She should have lived here. She should have been treasured and rich and so should he. But they hadn't, and for that this man would pay. He'd pay as his heart convulsed and then collapsed. He'd suffer as a thousand stinging insects set his nerves on fire. He'd suffer and he'd suffer and he'd suffer and then he'd be useful for once in his ruinous, miserable Muggle life. He'd make another horcrux for his son.

The magic poured into it. His soul split. He pushed the piece into the ring. It was easier the second time. It was more glorious.

"This could have been her wedding ring," he said as he rubbed his thumb over the black stone.

"I think most women prefer diamonds," Harry said.

Tom ripped his eyes off the corpse crumpled on the floor and stared at his friend. For a moment, his thoughts still raced through anger and destruction and power, then he took a deep breath. This was Harry. This was brother, raised in the same poverty, blessed with the same magical blood in his veins. No one else would ever understand that combination and how it could make you hate, but Harry would. Harry did. "He had to die," Tom said.

Harry shrugged. He didn't seem to have an opinion on the matter. "Do we have to bury him?" he asked. "Because that seems like work."

"I don't think we do," Tom said. He gave the body a vicious kick with one foot. The bastard had died with a look of terror on his face. Good. "Let him rot."

What he did want was to go back to that cottage. He wanted to do one last trick with memory that would be a far more creative way of punishing Morfin than killing him. Harry raised his brows but didn't object as Tom gestured sharply for him to follow. The cottage was just as miserable. It was everything he hated. Poverty. Squalor. Wizards shouldn't have to live like that. He pushed open the door with a promise to himself he'd take the hottest shower known to man after this. He'd scour himself to get any hint of this place out of his hair and off his skin.

"Ye came back."

Tom looked at Morfin. Loathsome creature. How could a wizard fall so low? It boggled the mind. It made him hate the man even more. "Lilies that fester," he said.

Morfin Gaunt, unsurprisingly, didn't follow the reference. Well, he could dwell on it in Azkaban. "Did you like murdering the Riddles," Tom asked softly.

Morfin looked at him with those stupid, hateful eyes and blinked. "What you on about?" he asked, then hissed out a series of insults in Parseltongue Tom had no intention of responding to. You lowered yourself when you allowed the lesser orders to goad you.

It was a bit trickier than _obliviate_. Obliviate would erase what had happened. Building false memories took more. You had to weave them in. It wasn't the most skillful job. It wouldn't stand up to the scrutiny of a talented legilimens. Tom could admit that but, then, he'd never done it before. It certainly fooled Morfin, and that was what mattered. Those bumblers at the Ministry of Magic wouldn't think to double-check. Not when this man confessed he'd murdered the Muggles on the hill.

"I asked," Tom said with deceptive patience, "Did you like murdering the Riddles?"

"Filthy Muggles," Morfin said, then spat. Harry edged away from the globule of phlegm and Tom renewed his promise to himself to take a long shower after this. Who know what diseases lurked in this cottage and he couldn't exactly confess to where he'd been if he went to St. Mungo's with some magical malady and it turned out to be something weird. Something they wanted to track down.

"They were filthy, weren't they?" Tom asked.

Morfin spat again. "That bastard," he said. "Seduced my sister. She was a trollop but she was still better'n any Muggle."

"How'd you do it?" Harry asked. Tom looked at him and he shrugged. "Just asking," he said. "I'm curious."

"Killin' curse," Morfin said. He sounded pleased with himself and Tom smiled smugly at the neatness of the work he'd done on the man's brain. Morfin pulled out his wand, pointed it at the corner, and said with great satisfaction, "Avada Kedavra."

Harry peered into dark recess where the green light had gone. "Got a rat," he said.

"Big one, too," Morfin said. "Not as big as that Riddle bastard, though." He squinted at Tom. "You got the look of him."

"Do I?" Tom asked. He pointed his wand at the man. "But I was never here."

The obliviate was very soft but it did its job.

. . . . . . . . . .

 ** _A/N – Tom quotes a line from Shakespeare's Sonnet 94: "_** ** _Lilies that fester smell_** **** ** _far worse than weeds"_**

 **.**


	10. Chapter 10 - Summer Before Seventh Year

Harry waited until they were a good twenty feet away from the Gaunt cottage before tossing Tom the wallet. Tom caught it deftly and pried it open. "What's this?" he asked.

"A remembrall," Harry said.

Tom rolled his eyes and Harry grinned. Tom already had the blue identification card in his hand. It wasn't as if he'd needed to ask the question; he'd earned his snotty answer. "Thomas Riddle," his Tom read. He tossed the card aside and began rifling through the folded pound notes. "Man kept a lot of cash on hand," he said.

"Seemed like it might be useful." Harry said. He could see the cloud that had settled over Tom the moment they'd walked into that manor house slowly start to fade away. That's what happened when you went digging into the past. You found things better off forgotten. He didn't ever want to find his parents. Who cared? They were the sort of people who left a baby in a basket on the stairs of an orphanage at night. Horrible people. Rotten people. People you couldn't trust. He didn't need to know anything more. If he ever had had the urge to track them down, what Tom had found at the end of his search was an object lesson that ignorance was bliss.

He highly doubted his own parents had been heroes.

One miserable, selfish bastard of a father could do for both of them.

"I don't know about you," Harry said as Tom counted the money, "but after today, I could do in a stay in a place with plenty of water."

"Hot water," Tom said.

They both glanced back at the cottage. "I agree," Harry said.

The hotel they found didn't want to let a room to two boys who looked so young, but a confundus charm mixed with a sob story about how their parents had died in the war and they were going to live with a cousin who tended the gardens on some estate out in Wiltshire landed them in a room.

The money didn't hurt. "A few extra for your trouble," Tom said. It might have been out of character for supposedly desperate boys, but Muggle minds managed to handle of all sorts of nonsense when you applied enough magic to their wee brains so the desk clerk slid the note into his pocket with a comment about how nice it was to see two strapping boys with such good characters.

The water wasn't hot enough to suit either of them but it ran and it was clean and magic could adjust the temperature. If there was one thing you learned at an orphanage, it was how to wandlessly adjust the cold showers. Another was how to check clothing for bugs.

Harry shook out his shirt and applied three more curses – at least they were curses to the pests – even after no more bodies fell to the floor. Tom ignited the corpses with a tiny, whispered curse. You couldn't be too careful. "Tell me we never have to go back there," Harry said. He pushed his arms back through the sanitized sleeves and fixed a steady look on Tom. "You're done with them, right?"

"Yes," he said. Tom tended to flowery speech. He liked to hold forth on the wonders of magic and the horrors of Wool's and what an absolute prat Abraxas Malfoy was with his money and his posh accent and his magical talents that were adequate but hardly outstanding. He didn't do blunt answers if he could monologue, so from him a simple yes was about as damning an affirmative as you could get.

Harry decided to comment. He stuck with, "Good."

"The pub had roaches," Tom said. "How can you expect me to frequent a village where the main eating establishment is overrun with filth?"

That was the Tom Harry knew. "Hard to keep things clean, I suspect," he said. He lowered his voice to a mocking whisper. "Don't know if you noticed this, but they're all Muggles."

Tom glowered for a moment, then laughed. "Filthy creatures," he said. "World would be better off without them."

"How about Malfoy?" Harry asked.

"Better off without him too."

"Have fun eating dinner at his house with that thought running through your mind," Harry said. "Please pass the butterbeer and, oh, by the way, you're worthless and I want you to die."

Tom gave him a look of utter disgust he pretended not to see. It stung a bit that Malfoy hadn't asked them both over to meet his influential father. He was the Quidditch star but still a nobody. Tom was a nobody who'd won an award. Tom was a nobody who'd helped Abraxas win an award. That made him not a nobody at all but a bright young fellow the Malfoys could feel good about helping out.

Tom did his mind reading thing. Harry could always tell. It felt a bit like déjà vu and he twitched away. "Don't," he said.

"Learn occlumency," Tom said.

"At Hogwarts?" Harry asked. His sneer was real for once. Hogwarts was good for a lot of things but he knew perfectly well they kept quite a few skills off the curriculum.

Tom made a bit of a grumble that meant he'd followed that, but at least he'd pulled his creepy legilimency fingers out of Harry's brain. "I'd bring you with me if I could," he said. To the Malfoy's, he meant, and Harry threw himself back on one of the hotel beds and groaned. He knew it was true. The pair of them did everything together. This vacation – no, don't call it a vacation. Call it a recruiting trip – would be the first time they'd been apart overnight since they'd been babes in arms.

"The food's probably bad," Harry said. "And I'd hate to miss the Wool's summer trip to the shore."

"That always a good time," Tom agreed.

. . . . . . . . . .

"Having a good time, boy?" Abraxas Malfoy's father asked. Tom gritted his teeth and forced out the most congenial smile he could. He already wanted to crucio this old fool but he couldn't yet. Yet being they key word. He still needed to pretend to be the grateful peasant, a bit overawed at the company he was keeping, happy for every scrap these pretentious old-money bastards threw him.

He wasn't sure who he hated more. These pure-bloods with their traditions and their customs and their closed way of seeing the world, or the Muggles who were barely human, little more than animals with no magic running through their veins.

Power was everything, and magic was power, and if you held yourself to the quaint rules and limits and traditions of the old pureblood families, you would be limiting yourself forever. He had no intention of ever acknowledging any limitation. Death itself would bow to him.

"Yes," he said, obsequious words in his mouth and murder in his soul. "Thank you so much, sir, for inviting me."

"Not like what you're used to, I bet," he said. The words didn't even do the courtesy of pretending to be a question and Tom blinked with his best charm and grace as he bobbed his head. The sail boat the Malfoy's had taken him out on dipped into the waves, and a spray of salt water flew up.

"We do go to the shore ever summer," he said. He could see the shore from here, sun speckled and dry. The shore couldn't see them, of course. The older Malfoy had patted his boat with proprietary pleasure as he explained the myriad invisibility charms that directed Muggle eyes away from their toy. Abraxas had looked miserably embarrassed. He'd known the spell work wouldn't impress Tom. They'd paid for it. Bought it off the rack. None of the Malfoy's had sullied their own hands with the work of casting.

Pathetic, really. They had magic and they paid other people instead of glorying in the feel of the wonder and glory of what they could do.

"The shore, yes but not like this," the older Malfoy said.

"No, sir," Tom agreed. The trip to the coast with a group of orphans and their caretakers was nothing like this fancy excursion. The company, however vile, was more honest. But not, he had to admit, as convenient for his plans. He'd known the Malfoy's were rich. He'd known they were influential. Knowing that was quite a bit different than sitting down at the dinner table with men from the Ministry and women with sharp noses and sharper eyes that smiled at him even as they assessed how useful he might be in the future.

He planned to be very useful indeed until the day they worried about how useful they were to him.

Abraxas appreciated none of it. He rolled his eyes when important men turned away to compliment his father on his poise. He slouched. He fingered his wine glass as if they only way to endure any of this was to get well and truly pissed. It wasn't that Tom didn't share his opinion of these old men who ran the Ministry with their greased palms and oiled smiles. But he resented that Abraxas could afford to show it. Smart and good looking and reasonably talented and he didn't even know how lucky he was.

Tom knew he was smarter. He was near enough to a genius to make no difference and there was no point in being humble about it. And for all that he wasn't busy tumbling every girl at Hogwarts, he knew they whispered behind their hands that he was _so_ handsome. He knew he could have had any one of them for the price of a flirtatious smile and a hint of warmth. Even that foul Walburga Black would unbend just to say she'd been the one to snag him. And his magical talents were the sort that emerged once in a generation. And none of it mattered because he was poor.

Poor and a half-blood and so while Abraxas slumped and grumbled he had to keep a bright smile on his face and gratitude in his mouth and someday all of these fools would choke on the bile he was holding back right now.

"Play your cards right," the elder Malfoy said as the wind made his blond hair into a veil, "and you'll end up at the Ministry yourself someday, young man. Abraxas'll need a good assistant, won't you son?"

Abraxas had the sense to look very uncomfortable at that suggestion. "Actually, father," he said, very cautiously but trying to steer the conversation away from the idea of Tom as his assistant, "I was thinking I might travel a bit before taking a position at the Ministry."

"Bit of a Grand Tour?" Tom asked, cocking his brows up. He might as well have said, "How posh." Abraxas certainly heard the unspoken sneer. His fair skin became tinged with red.

"Always a good idea," the elder Malfoy said. He clapped his son on the shoulder and smiled at Tom. "You should go along, young man. See a bit of the world. Take care of the reservations and such. Abbie's never been good at that sort of organization."

Tom was fairly sure he'd just been offered a job as a personal secretary. He glanced at Abraxas he smiled as gamely as he could. "That would be lovely, sir," Tom said. "What an opportunity."

"Assuming Abraxas passes his N.E.W.T.s," the older Malfoy added with a laugh he surely meant to be charming. His son shrank under it, pulling his chin down and lowering his eyes.

"Abraxas is a brilliant student," Tom said, all false innocence and not a little genuine confusion. Abraxas was never going to get written up in a history book on great wizards but he was no fool. He'd passed his O.W.L.s handily and Tom assumed he'd do the same with the next round of examinations.

"Have to earn your treats, don't you," Abraxas' father went on. "Look at Tom here. Nothing's been handed to him on a silver platter, son. Take a lesson. Builds character to work for what you want."

Tom caught Abraxas' eye with his own and, as soon as the older man turned away, made a mocking face. _We're in this together,_ that face said. _Our generation against his. And what a bore he is._

Abraxas brightened right up. People were so easy to manipulate Tom almost felt bad about it. Almost. "We'll travel," Abraxas said. "See the world."

"See what they don't teach us in Hogwarts," Tom said. That was what he wanted. The Restricted Section was filled with hints and whispers of a magical world that lurked in the shadows. Old texts brushed up against stories of how this wizard or that witch gained power beyond telling, then pulled away, a child whose hand had touched the fire. Tom was no child, and he wasn't afraid of getting burned. He'd stick one hand in the flames and use the other to wrest the hidden things out of the shadows those flames cast. He and Harry and, he supposed, Abraxas. Someone had to foot the bill. You could only get so far picking pockets and confunding people.

"You and me and Harry and Thoros," Abaxas said. He flung an arm around Tom who managed not to jerk away from the unwanted contact. "The four of us will see it all."


	11. Chapter 11 - Seventh Year

"We have to take Thoros with us?" Harry asked. He didn't stop folding his robes and checking over the contents of his trunk. It wasn't as if he planned to really object. He knew the value of a rich friend as well as Tom did. It had just been pleasant to imagine the pair of them wandering the world, poking their noses into dark magics and finding out what it was they could really do once they were free of Hogwarts and its oppressive rules. The fantasy was a lot less fun when you added two supposed friends to the mix.

"It wasn't my idea," Tom said.

Harry glanced over at Tom's trunk and, with a whisper, set an old diary on fire.

Tom put it out. "Very funny," he said.

" _It wasn't my idea_ ," Harry mimicked. That was a ludicrous excuse. Abraxas Malfoy wouldn't have noticed if Tom had tweaked his memory to forget that suggestion and they both knew it. More, Tom could have just played up how he, Abraxas, and Harry were the real circle of friends and Abraxas would have rushed to exclude his pure-blooded peer. He wasn't sure what Tom's real motivation was. It could have been the money. He could have wanted to kill Thoros slowly and painfully for some imagined slight. Harry didn't appreciate being handed such a feeble attempt at an explanation. He didn't like it when people kept him in the dark and Tom knew it.

Tom picked up the burnt diary and shook the pages. " _Reparo_ ," he said, and, even without his wand, the crumbled ash rebuilt itself and the singed leather cover grew back together. "Please be careful with my things."

Harry raised his brows.

Tom tucked the diary back into his truck where it snuggled next to books he'd liberated from the Malfoy library. The pages rustled and whispered and Harry half-expected a cat-fight to break out but, in the end, they curled into one another, in sympathy with one another's contents. "I thought you liked Thoros," he said.

"About as much as you like Abraxas."

"He has a library," Tom said.

Harry could feel his mouth form into the inevitable sigh. "A library," he repeated. That made the kind of sense he couldn't argue with. Abraxas had money, as did the pockets of any number of innocent passers-by, but texts were harder to come by. Texts and objects. "Does this library have a collection of special items?" he asked. "Rare time-turners? Cursed tiaras?"

Tom smiled. "It might," he admitted.

"For a bloody genius you're getting predictable," Harry said. He checked to make sure he had the books he needed and closed the lid of the trunk with just enough of a bang for Tom to notice he was annoyed. "There wasn't any other way to get access to the Nott toys?"

"If I'm going to build an army," Tom said, "that means putting up with that army."

Harry rolled his eyes and stomped off. He was going to raid the kitchen one last time. Magic would let him slip in unnoticed. It was odd to think they'd never come back to this place. It had been home, of a sort. Maybe not a very good home, but it had tried to provide enough food and beds for all the children who ended up on its doorstep. No one would accuse the place of excessive affection, and it was really training workers for a life of misery in the factories, but none of the staff were abusive. Beatings were the same sorts fathers handed out all over Britain. It could have been worse. Hogwarts had been more of a home, but he'd still almost miss Wool's. It had kept him alive.

This year's unfortunate cook – the staff tended to turn over quite a bit – had decided to make biscuits. Either the budget had taken an unusual turn toward surplus or she was about to get fired. Harry didn't especially care which. He snagged a dozen, still warm, popped one in his mouth, and sauntered back upstairs, stopping at the third-floor dormitory on the way. The current crop of five to eleven-year-old boys looked at him warily. Tom – and thus Harry – were widely regarded as people to avoid. He tossed the biscuits onto one of the beds. "Going away present," he said.

"Cook said those're fer the minister," one of the boys said. "He's comin' by ter bless the place or somethin'."

Harry snorted. He should have known better than to think for a moment anyone would waste sugar and flour rations on them. "You want the rest?" he asked.

The boys glanced at one another, afraid to say yes. Harry took another bite of the one still in his hand. "I'll tell the old bag it was me," he said. Mrs. Cole already hated him – hated them both. Dumbledore always looked at him as though he were a mystery. He wasn't good enough for the likes of the Malfoys. He'd take being the hero of a bunch of snot-nosed kid. It was the only heroism his life was ever likely to see.

He made a point of stopping by Mrs. Cole's office after he snagged and delivered the biscuits. The bitch had even sprung for chocolate for some of them and he knocked on her door as he chewed, pushed it open, and smiled at her, crumbs on his mouth and one last biscuit still in hand.

"Tom and I are heading off tomorrow," he said as congenially as possible. She had her head down over sheets of paper spread out on her desk and she grunted at him. "Don't think we'll be coming back after school ends. Wanted to thank you for everything you've done."

She looked up at that and he took another bite of the biscuit. It was incredibly rude, and he'd never have done this at school, but as he chewed he said, "These are good by the way." Then he turned on his heel and walked off. He could hear her rush from her office to the kitchen, her cheap shoes click-clicking on the worn floor in her hurry. It was wonderful.

The train to school was a bit less wonderful. Harry never liked seeing all the other families sending students off to school. Parents fussed and asked about robes and did they have enough spending money for Hogsmeade and harangued with reminders about not forgetting to write. He and Tom rolled their carts through the wall without a soul to wish them well. Girls wouldn't meet his eye while they stood next to their well-dressed parents and nodded seriously about how they'd study this year, and would tell this teacher or that one hello. Then, once they were through the barrier, they waved and him and dimpled and sometimes he really hated them. He hated all of them and he let out a low hiss that Tom had no trouble understanding.

"Good enough to shag," Tom said. "Not good enough to introduce to mother."

"Good enough to shag," Harry said in return. "Not good enough to remember the next morning."

Tom's laugh was low and mean. He looped an arm around Harry's shoulder, a rare expression of physical affection, and they pair of them deposited their trunks and loped off to find a compartment. Harry let a hand slide over more than one arse on his way toward the back of the train.

Halfway there, they caught up with Thoros who watched a girl giggle when Harry groped her. "Someday you're going to get slapped," he said.

Harry pushed open the door to an empty compartment and flopped down on the seat. Malfoy would undoubtedly find his way here but in the meanwhile he could enjoy the relative ease of only having to put up with one rich prat.

"Someday you'll get married," he said. "Since none of those nice girls will have me, I'll take what I can get."

Tom sat with precision that wouldn't have been out of place on a wizard four times his age. He pursed his lips and pretended to glare at Harry. "In my day, young man, we treated women with respect," he said. Thoros hid a smile and Harry bit at his own grin. When Tom wanted to be charming, he could play to any audience. "A woman is a pearl, a treasure, a – "

Walburga Black stuck her head in the door. "Is there room?" she asked.

"Bugger off," Tom suggested.

"You were saying?" Thoros asked after she slammed the door and flounced off in a huff.

"Women are delicate flowers," Tom said. He pointed a finger and Harry, adding a false tremor to his hand. "Just you wait, you good for nothing hooligan. You'll come to a bad end."

"Yeah," said Harry. "Probably will."

"Knowing Harry," Thoros said, "He'll be in bed naked with that end."

That made them all laugh, and they were still laughing when Abraxas joined them. "That Walburga is in a mood," he said. "Did her fiancé start growing facial hair or something?"

Tom leaned back and closed his eyes. "Last year, gentlemen. Then the real learning begins."

The train began, moving slowly at first, then more and more quickly as it pulled them all to Hogwarts for their N.E.W.T. year. Train speed crept up on you. At first it seemed the things would never go fast enough to get anywhere, then, you glanced away, ordered some candy, and when you looked back out the window the world had become a green blur. Their last year was much the same. The Sorting Feast had never taken so long. The first days felt painfully slow. Then it was Christmas. And Easter. And then the sun warmed the cold Scottish air again and, somehow, the school that had been their home was almost not and Harry stood in front of Albus Dumbledore, hands clasped behind his back.

The professor regarded him with a look so searching Harry had to wonder if he was as much a legilimens as Tom. If so, he said nothing about the murders he had to see inside his pupil's head. "We've enjoyed having you here at Hogwarts, Harry," he said.

"And I've enjoyed being here, sir."

"Did you never find out anything about who left you at Wool's?" Dumbledore asked.

"No sir," Harry said. He kept his face as blank as possible. "Muggle girl, I assume, caught in a family way."

"It happens," Dumbledore agreed. He continued to study Harry. "It's still odd, however, that you never appeared on the roles of magical births."

"Well," Harry said, "I like to think I'm a wizard."

"Yes," Dumbledore said slowly. "You're a wizard, Harry. You are also impossible."

Harry made a show of looking down at his body. He stretched out first one foot, pointed his toes, then repeated the gesture. "I look pretty possible," he said.

Dumbledore's smile settled down into one far more strained than merry. "Yes," he said. "No one can deny that you are here, and not all mysteries are ours to solve. Still, Harry, if you would deign to take a word or two of advice from a man who must surely seem unbearably old to you."

Harry didn't see how he had a choice so he put an expectant look on his face. Adults always wanted to pass on what they thought of as their wisdom and something about the end of school brought this out in every professor. He was getting used to pretending he was pleased to hear outdated, useless advice.

"I know that Tom is your friend," Dumbledore began. Harry let himself visibly stiffen and Dumbledore's smile became more conciliatory. "And it's no crime for a young man to be drawn to a brilliant, fascinating wizard," he said. "You just need to be careful, Harry. Everything that glitters is not gold."

"I don't understand what you are suggesting, sir," Harry said.

"Now that you are leaving Hogwarts, and leaving your home in the Muggle world, I suggest you part ways with young Mr. Riddle as well."

Harry looked at the man who'd tried to keep him out of Hogwarts, who still seemed to think his magic was some sort of peculiar, unwanted fluke. He might as well have pointed one of his long, knobby fingers at him, glittering with rings that were set in that gold he'd just mentioned, and said, _You don't belong here, boy. You weren't on the list._ He didn't belong in the Muggle world. He certainly wasn't going back to Wool's, or some dreary job in a Muggle factory. He liked Quidditch well enough, but a life on a Quidditch team didn't appeal to him and, in his heart, he suspected he wasn't good enough. And he certainly didn't belong with the purebloods who made up his house. No self-respecting wizard would let a boy who was surely either a Muggle-born or somebody's bastard marry his daughter, and any respectable employment he might be able to get would be the most menial of jobs. No friends. No connections. No family.

No one who cared about him in all this world except Tom and this old man wanted to part him from that friend too.

He'd sooner burn the world down.

"Thank you for the suggestion," he said, "but we already have plans to travel together."

Dumbledore nodded gravely. "Well, young Harry," he said. "Then I wish you the best."

. . . . . . . . . .

 **A/N - Thank you to AkaShika0306 and beaute-ephemere for beta reading!**


	12. Chapter 12 - Travel

Dumbledore might have wished him the best, but whatever that was, it was most certainly not this train. They'd been travelling for 37 days, a number close enough to the biblical 40 Harry had heard about at mandatory church services when he'd lived at Wool's. 40 days and 40 nights meant, "A damn long time," and he was about ready to say 37 counted. The train swayed. It jerked. It lumbered. It was magical, so they didn't have to hide their wands, but it was no Hogwarts Express.

Abraxas Malfoy had sprung for a private car which was as good as this train got. It had four bunks, and a porter who came by at night to lower them, and seats that were only a little lumpy. It had windows and a table that folded down so they could play cards, and it even had a bell to call the dining car. Truly a first-class experience. Harry should be grateful and he knew it. It was still terrible. They'd rumbled through France, which hadn't been bad despite the Muggle war, then over the mountains into Germany, which was. The porter had given them a flyer explaining the various enchantments the train used to hide them from Muggle eyes and protect them from Muggle bombs. Harry supposed that was something. The flyer apologized profusely that several regular stops would have to be skipped because of the 'troubles' in non-magical Europe.

Thoros Nott read it and tossed it down with a careless sniff. "Muggles," he said with disdain as he leaned forward to look out the window at the passing countryside. "How could anyone be so stupid as to play at war?"

"They aren't like us," Abraxas said. He looked apologetically at Harry, who shrugged. He wasn't going to defend Muggles to a rich pureblood, even if their war was spoiling the brat's Grand Tour. It wasn't as if he'd been longing to poke through the museums of Antwerp or see famous graveyards or anything. He was here because Tom wanted to do this and he'd follow Tom anywhere. That's what brothers were for, and they were brothers in all but blood. Brothers in poverty. Brothers in the way the wizarding world didn't quite want them. Brothers in all the ways that mattered.

"Where are we going," Harry asked Tom now.

Tom's shrug was far more aristocratic than Harry's. "We're on an adventure," he said. "Does it matter where we go?"

"Well, I like to know when I get to places," Harry said. "And I'm getting tired of what the dining car calls food."

"There's a cave," Tom said.

Very few pleasant adventures start out with the phrase, _There's a cave_. Caves, as far as Harry was concerned, were dark, often wet, and almost always hard to get to. This one proved to be no different. The train stopped for a full day in what was supposed to be a picturesque magical village. There was a pub, run by a man who wore white pantaloons, a purple embroidered jacket, and a feather cap. He spoke in an accent so regional that even Abraxas, who'd been forced to learn both French and German at the hands of a governess given free rein with a switch, couldn't understand a word. There was a fountain that bubbled with slightly brown water that was supposed to confer, if not eternal youth and beauty, at least somewhat better skin. A villager was doing a brisk business selling bottles of the stuff.

"Who wants to bet drinking that's nothing but a fast road to cholera?" Harry asked in an undertone. Tom guffawed. Thoros and Abraxas looked confused. Muggle diseases were unknown to them, and Harry didn't bother to explain.

He was far more interested in a witch wearing a push-up bodice and selling maps of vigorous local hikes. Travelers sometimes wanted to stretch their legs after their time on the train and she was happy to help them out. Harry bought one of her maps, slipping her a few extra knuts on the off chance he might get a chance to see her again later. Tom tweaked the folded parchment out of his fingers before he got a chance to open it.

"You want to go hiking?" Harry asked.

"More like spelunking," Tom said. "You never know what you might find."

And with that, they were off. Tom looked toward a cart selling pastries with his brows raised expectantly, and Thoros took the hint. This meant at least they had sweetmeat pies to eat as they rambled along a grassy path spotted with tiny wildflowers on their way to this cave. Multiple feet had smashed the grass to a flat carpet near the village but, as the way grew steeper, the grasses raised their myriad heads. By the time the boys had finished their pies and had to grab on to trees and rocks to keep themselves from slipping, the path was more of a suggestion than an obvious line in the ground.

"There," Tom said, pointing to a dark gash in the hillside. Harry groaned. They would have to climb up, over rocks and past what looked like a wasp's nest to get to this place. He'd never wanted a broom so badly in his life. He thought of it, tucked back in the train compartment, with longing so intense it would have been fair to call it lust.

"Problem?" Tom asked. "You look like you need to shit."

Harry flipped him off and all the boys laughed. Tom permitted that kind of rudeness from any of them, especially if he invited it with a crude remark, but never from anyone else. It made Thoros and Abraxas feel like they were part of the inner circle. They deluded themselves it made them all friends. Tom caught Harry's eye and for a moment they shared a quick, _these two arseholes are the worst_ grin before Harry sighed and began to pick his way up toward the cave. There better be a bloody vampire up there dispensing the secrets of the ages.

There was no vampire.

There was, however, a rather grouchy creature whose provenance hadn't made it into any of their studies at Hogwarts and who agreed to share her techniques for doing some unspeakable thing with the dead in exchange for a calcified human heart.

Harry decided it was probably better not to ask how Tom had known to bring such a thing. Where he'd gotten it was, likewise, a stone best left unturned. As far as he was concerned, a happy Tom was a good Tom, and if they could get this creature's notes on raising the dead and get back to the village before the train left he might be able to get a little time alone with one of the local witches.

Notes gotten, creature left licking at her new heart, they began to pick their way back down the hillside. "What do you plan to do with a bunch of zombies?" Abraxas asked.

Tom shrugged. He had a new book with nearly illegible scribblings tucked into a pocket and was beyond pleased with himself. He liked knowing things no one else did, and this qualified. "You never know when an army will come in handy," he said.

"A dead army," Thoros said slowly. Harry glanced at him. Thoros looked a bit horrified, which surprised him. Was the man just figuring this out? They weren't the good guys. Harry wasn't sure they were exactly bad, though the dead bodies in their wake suggested they might be. _He_ wasn't bad, at any rate. Tom probably was.

"Isn't death the last great mystery," Tom said smoothly. "How can we not want to understand it?"

"You and your interest in death," Harry said.

"There's a room," Abraxas said. He sounded like the words were being dragged out of him. Whatever this was, it was a thing he wasn't supposed to talk about but, of course, he also wanted to please Tom. People always did.

"What room?" Tom asked. He sounded pleasant enough. He wasn't. The thrum of concealed excitement still sounded under his words. He'd found a new target. Harry hoped it would be more pleasant than a cave.

"At the Ministry," Abraxas said. "There's a veil between the world of the living and the dead. I heard my father talking about it to some of his cronies one night." He let out a shallow, nervous laugh. "I guess it took a lot of money to build, and some of them think the budget for Unspeakable research is too high."

"Peasants," Tom said.

"If you wanted to understand death," Abraxas said. "That's a place to go, but I don't know why you would."

"What's all this power for if not to chase away death?" Tom quirked a brow up.

"Chase away…." Thoros' voice trailed off uncertainly. Harry pursed his lips and waited. He didn't think Tom would be likely to tell these two about his horcruxes, but he couldn't predict where else this conversation might go. He supposed Tom might demand Abraxas get him into the Ministry.

Tom eyed his lackeys and Harry could see the moment he decided not to push. He'd get what he wanted eventually, but for now he was going to step back a little. "You've heard of the Philosopher's Stone, of course," he said.

Thoros visibly relaxed. "Oh, yeah," he said. "Some crazy old guy made that. You want one?"

"Don't you have to be pure of heart, or something?" Abraxas asked.

Harry snorted. Both Abraxas and Thoros looked at him and he shrugged. He'd yet to see any kind of magic that gave a damn what your moral code was. Some things required a more focused intent than others, that he knew. Some things were more fiddly and easier to get wrong. You had to mean Unforgiveables, for example. You had to want to cause pain. But an arsehole could mean something with the same intensity a saint did. He suspected the magic required to make the rock of eternal life and wealth was just incredibly difficult, and most people weren't single-minded enough to do it.

Harry glanced at Tom.

Most people.

"Who wouldn't want a rock giving them eternal life and all the gold they wanted?" Tom asked.

"You can't want to make a Philosopher's Stone?" Thoros half-asked. The doubt in his voice suggested he didn't think Tom could do it, and normally Harry would have cringed away from that. Tom didn't take suggestions he wasn't brilliant and all-powerful especially well. People who implied that tended to end up hurt. Or, in the case of Tom's unpleasant father, dead. He didn't think Tom planned any such thing, though, and he needed Thoros, so in this one instance it would probably be fine.

"Nah," Tom said with casual nonchalance that belied the glitter in his eyes. He'd heard the doubt and hadn't liked it. "Who wants to spend twenty years bent over a cauldron adding in just the right amount of wormsblood and iron?"

"So…" Abraxas asked. "If it's not that, how do you plan to defeat death?"

Tom's shrug was almost merry. "If I knew, what would be the point of travel? We're doing this to learn things, after all, see the world. See how many ways there are to defeat the undefeatable. If there's one way, there must be others."

"If it's undefeatable," Abraxas started to say.

Tom cut him off. "Muggles think magic is impossible. We know better."

"Muggles," Abraxas said with contempt.

"Exactly," Tom said. His smile wouldn't have been out of place on the face of any con artist. It was the delighted grin of a man taking pleasure in reeling the mark in. It was one of Tom's weaknesses, Harry thought. He was always much too enamored with his own cleverness. "Muggles are beneath us, but what lies beyond us? What more can we be if we try?"

"Gods?" Thoros asked cautiously.

Tom's smile got brighter. "Who knows," he said. "Who knows."

They were close enough to the little village that Harry could smell onions frying. "I," he said, "am far less interested in being a god than in having a decent lunch. Those pastries you got were not enough."

"You don't want lunch," Abraxas said. "You want to talk to the girl selling it."

Harry shrugged. "It's not my fault girls don't like you," he said. "Way out here, it's not like they know how big your vault is."

Abraxas stiffened his shoulders and glared at Harry. If there was one thing he couldn't stand, it was the idea that no one liked him for himself. Harry watched him with the sort of unblinking stare he'd learned from Tom then, when Abraxas looked like he was about to crumble, he broke the tension by shoving the man in the shoulder. "Maybe you could show her something else big, see if she liked that."

"You keep your eyes to yourself," Abraxas said, but his smile was good natured again. "Perv."

"I just hear girls talking," Harry said.

Abraxas' desperation to ask what they said oozed out of every insecure pore but he couldn't quite lower himself to ask, and Harry wasn't going to make it that easy. They walked the rest of the way to the village, discussion about death and power neatly set aside in favor of leering recollections of girls they'd dated and girls who hadn't given them the time of day back at Hogwarts.

Harry let Thoros and Abraxas move on ahead and fell into step beside Tom. "The Philosopher's Stone?" he asked.

"Abraxas' giant cock?" Tom replied.

"At least one of them is real," Harry said.

Tom laughed. "Just don't miss the train," he said. "If you decide to screw the lunch girl."

"I won't," Harry said, and he didn't.

. . . . . . . . . .

 ** _A/N - Many thanks to moonlightmasquerade for beta reading._**


	13. Chapter 13 - The Tasks of Adulthood

When Tom had been stuck in a classroom deliberately tamping his cleverness down – because it was good to be thought of as _clever_ but being _too clever by half_ was not good at all – time dragged. He used to listen to Binns, for example, drone on about history and ask questions any dullard could get right. By the time people like Abraxas had managed to get through their heads that, no, goblins didn't necessarily love wizards and had tried to throw off their rule more than once, he'd plotted out a dozen ways he could convince the goblins in question to join him.

He played the same game in his mind with giants. With werewolves. With vampires. With anything that had power and strength. It wasn't even hard. Some – well, he generally called them people in his mind just for the ease of reference – people could be bought with money. Some wanted freedom and, if history could be trusted, would follow the siren call of anyone who claimed he could remove whatever shackles they imagined around their feet. People like Abraxas wanted to see themselves as valuable. With people like Thoros, you could appeal to their prejudices. Everyone wanted to believe he was part of the chosen few and everyone else was beneath him.

And no one liked Muggles.

You could attract people by appealing to their fears and their hates, and it was so easy to appeal to the hatred of Muggles.

As he travelled with Thoros and Abraxas, gathering up nuggets of information about magic, Tom slowly wore away whatever moral sense either of them had about what magic was _appropriate_ and what was _forbidden_. By the end of their Grand Tour, it was Abraxas who said, "There's no such thing as right or wrong when it comes to magic. Just power."

"Do you think?" Tom asked. He was turning a small metal ball around and around between his fingers. A witch in Albania had parted with it – and her life – after he explained his reasons for wanting it. Mainly, that she didn't want to give it to him. It had turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, nothing more than a child's toy, but at least he hadn't overpaid for the silly thing. He tossed it to Harry, who grabbed it out of the air without looking up from his magazine.

"I do," Abraxas said. He was so certain. So _sure_ he'd come up with that on his own. It was charming, really. And a bit pathetic.

Tom flashed his warm smile at Abraxas. This was the one tuned to seem maybe the tiniest bit amused, just enough to keep its victim off-kilter, but mostly approval. And Abraxas always wanted approval. He flourished under it, like a houseplant in a good window.

"The Blacks are having a party when we're back in London," Thoros said. He sounded glum. Tom supposed he couldn't blame him. This trip had been a welcome escape for both his little pureblood pets. They'd gotten away from family and responsibility, and now future wives and estates waited for them. Time to become adults. Time to become good little members of their society.

"I'm sure you'll have a good time," Tom said. He hadn't received an invitation, of course. The Blacks weren't the sort to stoop to having an orphan in their home, no matter how much of a prodigy he might be.

Thoros flicked a wadded-up bit of parchment at him. "So will you," he said. "Assuming you can stomach Walburga."

Tom raised his brows. That was unexpected.

Abraxas shrugged. "I'm not going if they won't welcome my friends," he said. "You and Harry are worth a dozen of them."

Tom gave him one of his few real smiles. "Oh, at least," he said.

. . . .. . . . . .

The Black townhouse oozed wealth. Tom didn't especially care for it. He didn't like the house elf heads mounted on the wall, and he didn't like the condescending smiles on the faces of the patriarchs. He'd thought he disliked Walburga, here with her infantile fiancé. He liked the previous generation even less.

"So," this Pollux said. He barely looked old enough to be Walburga's father, and the witch's mother had kept her youth too. Were they using some sort of cosmetic potions, or had they really been young teenagers when they spawned their horrid daughter? Tom wondered if he'd be able to get a close look at the family tapestry he'd glimpsed in the other room and check out the dates. "Malfoy let his precious boy roam the world with some orphan brat. Surprises me. Nott too. What makes them like you, Tom Riddle from nowhere?"

Pollux twisted his name into a sneer, and Tom wondered how many of this clan he could destroy. Not kill. Killing them all would be too easy. Could he get them to wipe themselves out? "People find me charming," he said with a shrug. Then he added a little laugh. "Besides, isn't taking a turn around the continent and sowing wild oats a bit of a tradition? With me in tow, they could hardly end up in a gambling den and have to floo home, begging for money."

Pollux grunted. "Suppose that's the truth," he said. "You haven't a pot to piss in, have you?"

"No, sir," Tom said. It was always better to agree with them. Better to seem as if you were both humble and laughing at yourself. "I'm off to get a job now that we're home."

"What do you have in mind?" Pollux asked. "Ministry work?"

Tom shook his head ruefully. "Can't swing that, sir," he said. "Those jobs aren't for the likes of me. No, I'm going to go into the shops. Developed a bit of an interest in obscure magic while we were out in the world. Plan to see if Borgin will take me on, teach me the ropes."

When he entered the Ministry, he planned to do so as a conqueror, not some sort of lowly intern there to fetch the coffee and sharpen the quills. He glanced across the room. Harry seemed to be having a bit better luck than he was. A gaggle of girls – all cousins, Tom supposed – had flocked to his side and he was using his smiles and his Quidditch stories to suss out which one would meet him in the butler's pantry later for a quick hand job.

"Borgin, eh?" Pollux was saying and for a brief, horrible moment the two lines of thought – Harry with some girl on her knees in front of him and Pollux's wide mouth – combined into one, horrible image. Tom had to force it away lest he become ill right here on the expensive, imported carpet. "Good man, Borgin. He and Caractacus both. Good men. Interesting store. I could put in a word."

Tom did not think Pollux Black's input would affect the store's hiring practice one whit, but as pointing that out would be impolitic, he merely smiled with his standard, obsequious smile and said, "I would be quite grateful if you would, sir."

Pollux's face took on the sheen on the flattered, and Tom wondered, not for the first time, how it was all these men were so utterly stupid. They caressed their wands and did the same spells they'd been doing since they were students at Hogwarts. They treated magic like a stroll down the pavement. They were lazy and despicable and no better than the very Muggles they considered filth. Worse, really, because they had the capacity to be so much more. That contempt didn't keep him from taking Pollux's card with the address of a good landlady in Knockturn. He and Harry needed a home base if they were going to take over the world, and he wasn't planning on kissing enough Malfoy arse to use Abraxas' place.

. . . . . . . . . .

"Do you mind?" Harry glared at him from the butler's pantry, and Tom rolled his eyes. It was more than obvious that they were finished, and now that the girl was done sucking him off, you'd think he'd be grateful to be rescued from having to actually talk to her. "I'm sorry," he said. "It has to be important, or he wouldn't have burst in on us."

"I understand," the girl said. This one had ginger hair and freckles across her cheeks. When she smiled at Tom, they made a neat line he could follow if he wanted to cut her face into two equal halves. Connect the dots. He smiled at the convenience of that. "But owl me?"

"Of course." Harry bent down and brushed his lips across the palm of her hand in a gesture he had to have lifted from some godawful Muggle film. They were out and onto the pavement before he spoke again. "Christ, Tom. I was about halfway into talking her into going upstairs and finding an empty bedroom for something a little more fun."

Tom didn't bother to reply to that, just handed Harry the card. He sighed and looked at it, then turned it over. "That's all?" he asked. "You pulled me away from the most agreeable Prewett girl I've ever met because of _that_?"

"Let's go find a flat," Tom said. "Then you can owl her."

"I'm not going to owl her," Harry said with disgust. "I don't want to _date_ her, Tom."

Tom laughed and looped an arm around Harry's shoulders. It was such an out-of-character moment of affection Harry stopped walking and looked at him. "You okay?" he asked.

"Just… what would I do without you?"

"Rule the world for about five minutes before everyone came after you with pitchforks for being crazy?" Harry suggested.

That sounded about right, so Tom laughed again and pointed his feet in the direction of what was going to be their new flat no matter what persuasion techniques he had to use on the landlady. He had his education. He'd travelled the world. Now to get his hands on as many of the Dark trinkets of Magical Britain as he could, set his plans in motion, and end up with more power than any of these arrogant purebloods, then any Headmaster or orphanage matron or dying mother. It was all going to be his. All of it.

The future belonged to him.

. . . . . . . . . .

"And this could belong to you," Tom said, deftly extracting the necklace from the display case and handing it over to the old woman. He hadn't expected to enjoy the sales part of retail. He'd only wanted to find more Dark objects, more power. More _things_. And he had. The flat he shared with Harry had more than a few of his finds on the shelves. But this… he liked this too. The gentle art of making people _want_.

The old biddy in front of him could have afforded the cursed necklace a dozen times over. But she needed to be persuaded. She needed to shift from seeing it as one more shiny bauble, just like any other, and start seeing it as the thing that would make her happy again. Would make her young.

Would push away the death that was already creeping along her wrinkled face.

"Pity you can't wear it, of course," Tom said, holding it out and admiring the diamonds. "It would sit against your neckline just so, but it's already killed at least a dozen women."

"It's a pretty thing," she said.

"Oh, gems are only as lovely as the woman wearing them," Tom said. He didn't look at her as he said it. You couldn't be too obvious. Best to seem a little distracted. "One can _imagine_ them pressed against the skin of a girl, dress a little too low, not so much as to be vulgar, just enough to entice."

"You have to lure them in," the woman said knowingly. "If they can see all the goods, they lose interest."

Tom neatly kept the way his stomach wanted to heave under wraps. "But these jewels can never be worn."

She reached out and took them from his hand, letting the chains slide through her fingers. "I had a necklace when I was a girl," she said, and he knew he had her. He let her ramble on about whatever godawful bit of wealth she'd tied to her ugly neck to lure in whatever men had been stupid enough to fall for things that glittered. Once they started talking about themselves, you had them, but you had to make it seem like they were about to lose the prize, so he took the necklace back and began to arrange it on its tray again. The black stone in the Gaunt ring caught the light of the display case as he moved to slide the necklace back into place and the woman stopped talking mid-sentence.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

"Oh, yes," she said. "But don't bother putting that back. We'll be ringing it up.

"Are you sure," he asked. "Remember, you can't wear them."

She cackled. "Not everything is for wearing, boy." Then she reached out a gnarled finger and tapped on his ring. "That, though. Quite a showy bit for a clerk. Where'd it come from."

"Family heirloom," he said. "Not valuable, I'm afraid."

"You never know." Her smile was unpleasantly knowing, and he wanted to choke her right there with the necklace she was about to buy. Maybe he'd get lucky, and the stupid bitch would give in to the temptation to put it on. Then, bam. Dead. And Borgin's had a retrieval clause that would put it right back in the display case. They wouldn't return the money, of course. No one ever got their money back.

"Oh?" he asked.

"I bought a piece once," she said. "Old locket. Looked worthless."

"Family lockets often are," he agreed. "Though sometimes they have pictures in them that are invaluable to some."

She cackled. She actually _cackled_. "Not this one, boy. This one was an heirloom of the sort of family everyone wants. Not me. I'm descended from Helga Hufflepuff."

Everyone wanted to be descended from one of the Hogwarts founders. Given the number of people claiming they were, it was amazing the foursome had found time to start a school what with all the time they must have spent popping out babies.

"But this locket," she went on, "It came from Salazar Slytherin himself."

Tom's step faltered for only a moment as he walked to the register with the necklace. "Oh?" he said. "What a treasure. Would you like to take this piece with you now, or shall I have it delivered later?"

She patted him on the arm with that disgusting, gnarled hand. "You bring it by later, boy. Maybe, if you're very good, I'll show you my collection."

"Won't that be nice." Tom pulled out a ledger, ever so careful not to react. Never let the mark see you are interested. "How would you like to pay for your necklace. Shall I put it on your account?"

Even as he spoke he scanned her page in the ledger. She was a magpie, taking bibs and bobs every few weeks. Her house was surely a fire hazard. But there, way up the page, he saw it.

 _Locket. Green with S monograph. Sold to Hepzibah Smith._

 _. . . . . . . . . ._

 **A/N - Please note that Molly Weasley née Prewett would not have even been born yet at the time this chapter takes place. Please stop sending me reviews with variations on the theme that her inclusion makes you want to puke.**


	14. Chapter 14 - Hepzibah Smith

Harry tossed the snitch up in the air, caught it, and tried not to look as bored as he felt. Hogwarts might as well have been a thousand years ago. Now, life was going to work at the Ministry, coming home, eating cheap food, sleeping, and doing it all again. For some unfathomable reason, he'd thought being an Auror would be fun.

It was not fun.

He was behind all the other recruits because of the time he'd spent touring the world on Malfoy's knut, and he didn't care about catching Dark wizards or policing Muggle artifacts. They were all so stupid about it he was sometimes surprised he didn't discover wizards on their knees in Muggle houses sticking knives into electrical outlets asking, "What does this do?"

Not that he'd stop them if he did.

"Good day at work?" Tom asked, tossing a bag of fish and chips down on the table.

Harry eyed him. Tom's smile glittered, and his skin had that gleam it got when he was excited about a new toy, and he wasn't commenting about the knickers yesterday's witch had left on the counter. "You kill someone today?" he asked sourly.

"Noooo," Tom drew the word out.

"Find a new trinket?"

"Maybe?"

Harry tossed the snitch up one more time, caught it, then shoved it down into a pocket. "Don't suppose I can use it to kill my boss?"

"Probably not," Tom said with what sounded like genuine sympathy. "Why don't you quit?"

"I've found the need for money and food to be compelling arguments against unemployment."

Tom snorted. "Confound a few Muggles, steal their money, it'll be fine."

The concept of consequences never entered Tom's mind. It was one of the refreshing things about him. Most people fretted over things. It was wrong, or they would get caught. They wrung their hands and dillied this way and dallied that way and opportunity passed them by. Harry could only manage to muster Tom's level of indifference to the outcome when it came to girls, but he had to admit it worked. It worked every time. "Maybe, you're right," he said.

"I always am." Tom pulled plates out of the cupboard and began pouring tonight's takeaway onto them. "Want to make a delivery with me later?"

"Bad enough I have to do my job. Why would I want to do yours?"

"Because your brother is asking you to?"

Harry rolled his eyes and accioed a fork from the drawer, but they both knew he'd go. It wasn't as if he had anything better to do, and Tom's plans had to be more interesting than the day's lecture on charming Muggle objects and why you shouldn't do it, complete with a quiz planned for tomorrow on being able to cite Ministry code and take charms off things Aurors working in the field had confiscated. Harry had taken a peek in the box before leaving. A watch tried to bite him for his trouble.

They'd only gotten three steps inside the door of Hepzibah Smith's cluttered house for Harry to realize he'd made a mistake. The elf eyed him with the scowl and muttered words under its breath they all pretended not to hear. Harry guessed the creature had slipped into old age and suffered from whatever the elf version of dementia was. He hoped it didn't decide to kill him what with the way the lady of the house seemed a bit surprised he was there. An addlepated elf was dangerous.

"Get some cocoa, Hokey," Madam Smith said, averting that particular disaster and sending the elf off to the kitchen mumbling, "cocoa" over and over again under its breath as if it were afraid it would forget.

Tom slid a necklace box her way and whispered, "new trainee," under his breath, and she brightened up a bit. Harry trailed the pair of them as she led Tom through a veritable rat's nest of magical flotsam. Her shelves had junk. Her tables had junk. Harry wasn't sure what it was about wizards and witches that made them such hoarders, but for a people who could create almost anything they needed out of rocks, they seemed awfully obsessed with keeping every last trinket that came their way.

And talking about them.

Madam Smith had a story for every artifact, and by the second pile, Harry began to be afraid she really did mean to share them all. By the third, he was convinced of it. By the fourth, he hoped Tom's plans for the evening included killing her.

The necklace Tom had brought went into a drawer with, as far as Harry could see, a dozen other necklaces. "What's that one?" Tom asked as nonchalantly as possible, reaching his hand down to touch one of the boxes.

"Oh, you do have an eye," Madam Smith said. "This is the one I was telling you about, and right to it you go, like a niffler in heat."

Well, that was a disgusting image, but Harry kept his face blank as Madam Smith lifted out a dull green locket. It didn't look like anything special. Too much time spent in Slytherin where girls talked about jewellery – and compared it - in specific detail had left Harry with enough unwanted knowledge he could tell at a glance it was nothing but glass. Tom let out a slight hiss at the sight.

 _Mine._

Harry's brows went up, and he flicked a glance at Madam Smith but, like most people, all she heard was an exhale. She probably assumed it was in appreciation, and while she wasn't exactly wrong, Harry wouldn't want to be the owner of anything Tom had decided was really his.

"You got this at Borgin's?" he asked a little too carefully as Madam Smith handed it over.

"I did." Madam Smith must be an idiot because she sounded smug. "Some girl had come in with it. Didn't know the value, silly thing. Sold it for a song."

"Desperate, probably," Harry said.

Madam Smith didn't care for the way he interrupted her story. She sniffed. "Probably, but that's what happens when you get pregnant and haven't a pot to piss in."

"I do think the man involved might have had something to do with it," Harry said. Tom's shoulders had become noticeably tighter, and he wanted to ward off any immediate violence. "I understand it takes two to make a baby."

Madam Smith tittered. "It's true," she said. "Not that men ever have to really pay. They can walk away and leave their mistakes selling heirlooms to buy dinner."

"And this is an heirloom?" Tom asked.

"Slytherin's locket?" Madam Smith asked. "I should say so."

She eyed them both, waiting for their response. Harry smiled politely, his attention fixed on Tom. If he killed the old biddy right now, they'd have the elf to deal with. "Impressive," Tom said. "That poor woman," and he handed the locket back. "I'm sure whatever man left her in such dire straits as to sell this ended up regretting it."

Harry managed not to snort.

"If you're impressed by that, I have something else to show you," Madam Smith said. "A real treasure."

Harry avoided making any kind of eye contact with Tom as the elderly woman led them to yet another cabinet. "It was my grandmother's," she said with a flavor of the same smug pride Harry was used to in Tom. He leaned forward, interested now, and his eyes widened when she pulled out a small cup, the sort of fancy goblet people used in old paintings, and held it toward them. The thing was gold, and a badger danced along one side, and Harry could hear Tom suck in his breath.

"Is that?" he asked, and for once the awe in his voice was real.

"Helga Hufflepuff's cup," Madam Smith confirmed.

Christ. Harry rubbed one hand over his face. This was going to end so badly. Not for him. After this find, he'd have no trouble talking Tom into stopping for a pint on the way home. But poor Madam Smith. She might have lived through the theft of Slytherin's locket, but objects from two Hogwarts founders? That would be harder to steal on the sly, especially given the way she was holding that cup. She probably had a dozen anti-theft charms on the cabinet it was in, and those would take time to unravel, and it would be tricky to get that done with her standing over them.

People were so fussy about not letting you have their things. Whether they were old hedge witches with what turned out to be useless old spoons or this woman with her golden cup, Tom always ended up having to kill them.

Madam Smith put the cup back away. Harry counted at least three charms that clicked into place, and there were probably more. Ugh. He was going to want two pints after helping to unravel all of that.

"I think the cocoa is probably ready," she said.

The cocoa was ready. So was Tom. He poured extra milk for the old lady with every gracious line that time spent around the Notts and the Malfoys had trained into him. He was elegant and deferential and, as Harry watched, he emptied out a tiny packet of some powder or other into her cup, then stirred both it and the milk in. The silver spoon clinked against the porcelain, and he handed her the cup with the hint of a bow.

She giggled through her nose.

Harry declined his own cup.

Tom sat and prepared his as Madam Smith took a sip, then another, then began to choke.

"What did you put in it?" Harry asked as her skin began to turn blue and she clawed at her throat in evident agony.

"Something I filched from Slughorn back in the day," Tom said. "Pretty common poison really. Nothing special. Pity no one has a bezoar around, but what can you do?"

Madam Smith began to point frantically at a drawer, her flailing hand becoming more and more desperate before it sagged against her, her head lolled to one side, and a line of spittle began tracing its way down her chin.

Her chest didn't rise.

Tom stepped over her outstretched legs to open the drawer she'd been pointing to. "Look," he said, false surprise in his voice. "There was a bezoar after all."

He tossed it to Harry, who rolled his eyes but tucked the useful little item down into his pocket. You never could tell when you'd need one. "What do you plan to do about the elf?" he asked.

"Don't suppose you can make it forget we were here?" Tom said. "I've got to go unravel those wards."

"We're taking the cup too, then," Harry said. It wasn't really a question because of course they were. "Be fast about it, would you?" He plucked a biscuit off the tray and popped it into his mouth, then grimaced. Stale. He should have guessed. This whole house was stale and closed and fading into the past.

He glanced at Madam Smith. Well, she was really all the way faded.

He'd never tried to obliviate an elf. He wasn't sure it could be done. And maybe it couldn't. Hokey was so old, though, and so forgetful, that when he walked in on her in the kitchen her mind went blank, and it was easy to stun her. From there, he poked at her mind, erasing himself and Tom from her memories, replacing them with confusion and an endless loop of wiping off the same kitchen counters.

Of course, that left the extra dishes. Harry threw a dirty look back toward Tom, who was still undoing all the protections guarding Helga Hufflepuff's cup, and started to wash up the evidence there'd been three people drinking cocoa, not one.

"The things I do for you," he muttered.

Tom popped his head around the door. "What are you doing?" he asked. "Why are you doing dishes by hand?"

"Removing the evidence we were here," Harry said. Honestly, sometimes Tom missed the really obvious things. This woman was rich enough the Ministry would at least send over some token Aurors, and if there were traces of magic smeared all over the place they might even think to ask questions. Probably not, but when you were stealing priceless historical artifacts and blaming a creature, you should bloody well be careful. "Did you get what you want?"

"And a few other things to boot," Tom said. He tossed Harry a necklace with a complicated gadget at the bottom.

"What's this?"

"Some kind of fancy time turner," Tom said. "Want to travel back in time and find out who your parents were?"

Harry threw the device back as hard as he could, and Tom laughed as it slammed into an open cabinet and broke a fussy, pink teacup. He didn't share Tom's fascination with parentage. His mother was nobody and his father nothing. It wasn't as if he was going to go back and find out his father was a pureblood or his mother a heroine. His mouth tightened at the thought of how different things would have been if he'd not been an orphan. Not been beneath everyone. Then, he forced his muscles to relax. He'd never make himself acceptable to the wizarding world, and he didn't plan to bother trying. He was nothing to them, which meant they were nothing to him.

" _Accio_ time turner," Tom said, and the chain unwound itself from the broken cup and sailed through the air to his hand.

"You too good for wands now?" Harry asked.

"You would be too, if you just practiced," Tom said. He pocketed the time turner. "Who knows when this will come in handy."

. . . . . . . . . .

 **A/N - Thank you to anditjustmadeherkind and for beta reading!**


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